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A Study Room Guide on physical and conceptual borders within Live Art
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Cover image credit, Aptrida por voluntad propia (Stateless by choice) by Nria Gell
Performing Borders
A Study Room Guide by Alessandra Cianetti
This Study Room Guide explores the ways Live Art practices have been
responding to the notion of borders, both physical and conceptual. As a
border practice that crosses and pushes boundaries, Live Art has been
one of the most responsive ways in which artists have been addressing
the shifting notion of borders and connected societal issues. From this
perspective, the ephemerality, flexibility and resilience of Live Art become
a privileged way to investigate urgent current political changes and
struggles within and across borders. This Guide explores the notion of
border in relation to Live Art and the works of experimental artists that
have been addressing issues around physical borders, with a special focus
on the current European situation and its multiple crises.
2
Border practices: Live Art and Borders
In the last decades borders have become a crucial site for political
research and artistic practice.2 In its crossing borders and entering
different fields, Live Art has been experiencing what political theorists
Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, in their analysis of borders within the
contemporary world, call the productive power of borders: their role in
the fabrication of the world as a centre of contemporary experience.3 If
criticality is a strategy for the production of knowledge,4 Live Art
practices sit at the very centre of such criticalities, working on boundaries
between disciplines, media, and social, political and economic issues.
1
Hutnyk, J. (2012) Beyond Borders London: Pavements Books, pp.1-4
2
Mezzadra, S. and Neilson, B. (2013) Borders As Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor
Durham and London: Duke University Press, p. 4.
3
Ibid., p. vi.
4
Thornton, S. (2008) Seven Days in the Art World London: Granta Publications, p. 62.
3
vanishing, even as [they are] becoming,5 looking at Live Art as a praxis of
becoming that escapes fixed and final ends. As per Allan Kaprows
definition of happenings: context rather than category. Flow rather than
work of art.6
The invention of borders in Europe marks the birth of the modern nation-
state, with the term border replacing former notions such as the Roman
Empires limes and the Medieval marches. This process synthesised what
tienne Balibar, one of the authorities on the study of borders in the last
decades, defines as territorialisation of space.9 Although for him borders
function of demarcation and territorialisation is still present today, the
territorialisation of space, linked only with the most common idea of border
as a tool for mapping, is a one-sided philosophically speaking
approach.10 Balibar declares that any process of territorialisation is also
the reverse side of another, opposite, process of
deterritorialization, which takes place before, or after, or simultaneously.11
In his opinion, if we use the generalised concept of territory12 that along
with the division and articulation of spatial units includes their institutional
counterparts,13 that is, the power structures that shape spaces,
languages, moralities, symbols, productive activities etc. to territorialize
means to assign identities for collective subjects within structures of
5
Summers, R. Vaginal Davis does Art History, in Harris, J. (2007) Dead History, Live Art?
Spectacle, Subjectivity and Subversion in Visual Culture since the 1960s Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press + Tate Liverpool, p. 74.
6
Aldouri, H. (2016) Prt--mager. Review of In The Flow, by Boris Groys. Radical
Philosophy, 197(2), p. 58.
7
For example: RoseLee Goldberg defines Performance Art as a way of breaking down walls
within categories (Goldberg, R. (2001) Performance Art. From Futurism to the Present. 3rd
edn. New York: Thames & Hudson, p.7).
Adrian Heathfield talks of Live Art as a mean through which to test the foundations and
borders of identity (Heathfield, A. (2004) Live Art and Performance London: Tate
Publishing, p.10).
The Live Art Development Agency sees it as a way to disrupt borders, breaking rules,
defying traditions, resisting definitions, asking awkward questions and activating
audiences (Live Art Development Agency (2015). Available at: www.thisisliveart.co.uk,
Accessed: 5 August 2016).
8
Harris, J. (2007) Dead History, Live Art? Spectacle, Subjectivity and Subversion in Visual
Culture since the 1960s Liverpool: Liverpool University Press + Tate Liverpool, p. 132.
9
Balibar, . Europe as Borderland, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27 (2),
pp. 191-192.
Ibid., p.192.
10
Ibid.
11
Ibid.
12
Ibid.
13
4
power, and, therefore, to categorize and individualize human beings and
the figure of the citizen [] is exactly a way of categorizing individuals.14
Because of these overlapping functions and the effects borders have both
on geographies and subjects, at the end of the essay Europe as
Borderland, Balibar highlights the increasing centrality of the notion of
border in contemporary political debates, stating that there is a paradox of
the movement of borders from the edge to the centre of political space
and debate.15
14
Balibar, . Europe as Borderland, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27 (2),
p. 192.
15
[] Sometimes noisily and sometimes sneakily borders have changed place. Whereas
traditionally, and in conformity with both their juridical definition and cartographical
representation as incorporated in national memory, they should be at the edge of territory,
marking the point where it ends, it seems that borders and the institutional practices
corresponding to them have been transported into the middle of political space. They can
no longer function as simple edges, external limits of democracy that the mass of citizens
can see as a barrier protecting their rights and lives without ever really interfering with them
[]. Ibid., pp. 109-110.
16
Mezzadra, S. and Neilson, B. (2013) Borders As Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor
Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp.17-18.
17
Ibid.
18
Ibid, p. 6.
19
Balibar, . (2004) We, the people of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship
Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 5.
5
disappearing as well as sometimes crystallizing in the form of threatening
walls that break up and reorder political spaces that were once formally
unified.20 The constant recombination of spaces and times is at the centre
of Mezzadra and Neilsons analysis of the process of proliferation and
transformation of borders.21 That is what for them constitutes the symbolic
dimension of border as an essential tool for cognitive processes; a tool
that allows the structuring of movements of thoughts through establishing
taxonomies and hierarchies of concepts.22
Geographical and portable' borders got at the centre of Live Art studies
with the bold theoretical attempt to blend the ever-developing notion of
border with the shifting nature of the performative medium made in 2015
by art historian Ila Nicole Sheren in Portable Borders. Performance Art and
Politics on the U.S. Frontera since 1984.23
20
Mezzadra, S. and Neilson, B. (2013) Borders As Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor
Durham and London: Duke University Press, p. 6.
Ibid., p. 7.
21
Ibid., p. 16.
22
23
Sheren, I. N. (2015) Portable Borders. Performance Art and Politics on the U.S. Frontera
since 1984 Austin: Texas University Press.
24
Mignolo, W. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledge, and
Border Thinking in Sheren, I. N. (2015) Portable Borders. Performance Art and Politics on
the U.S. Frontera since 1984. Austin: Texas University Press, p. 3.
25
Sheren, I. N. (2015) Portable Borders. Performance Art and Politics on the U.S. Frontera
since 1984 Austin: Texas University Press, pp. 41-43.
6
multiple contextsespecially those of academia, the media, activism, and
the art world. [] We began to theorize the border as a paradigm, as a
theoretical paradigm that would contest Eurocentric postmodern
paradigms. [] Overlapping universes could only be articulated by an
equally complex art form [] because in many ways performance is a
border language [it] is the clash of disparate elements in the same way
border is.26
Ila Nicole Sheren brings the border into the discussion about performance
art not only as a way to think about performers works but also as a
potential way to allow for a complete reinvention of the traditional
narratives of art history.30
Ibid.,, p. 66.
27
Ibid., p. 3.
28
Ibid., p. 3.
29
Ibid., p. 136.
30
Harris, J. (2007) Dead History, Live Art? Spectacle, Subjectivity and Subversion in Visual
32
Culture since the 1960s Liverpool: Liverpool University Press + Tate Liverpool, p.128.
Ibid., p.141.
33
Ibid., p.119.
34
7
Live Art as a Borderscape
In Border as a Method, Mezzadra and Neilson state that the value of the
borders as a means of research lies in their productive power as a method,
while their
existence is fragmented, multi-layered, constantly shifting both in space
and time. For the authors to approach the border as a method means to
suspend, to recall a phenomenological category, the set of disciplinary
practices that present the objects of knowledge as already constituted and
investigate instead the process by which these objects are constituted.35
As for the Guillermo Gmez-Peas persona The Brujo36 symbol of
portable cross-border performative practices the artist becomes the
researcher of these spaces, the international border crosser. In Sherens
words that have echoes of Heideggers writing, as discussed later in this
essay the artist is the potential border dweller who co-habits spaces of
cultural and social differences.37 This is a difficult position to inhabit and
coexist within, according to tienne Balibar: you can live on one side or
the other side of a border (geographic, social, etc...) but to be yourself a
border it is much more problematic, border being part of your identity and
how you are perceived by others.38
If a Live Artist is a border dweller she puts herself in a place that for
Michel de Certeau can be defined as fixed and controlled locatedness
but also she is on a space that is a practiced place, used by individuals
who cross it, occupy it and re-use it.39 And if for Theodor Adorno home is
a concept of the past therefore dwelling is now made impossible,40 what
Live Art does is to work in the shifting, non-determined spaces that are
borders, building a home41 although temporary, a possibility of
familiarity, through live interventions.
35
Mezzadra, S. and Neilson, B. (2013) Borders As Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor
Durham and London: Duke University Press, p. 17
36
Sheren, I. N. (2015) Portable Borders. Performance Art and Politics on the U.S. Frontera
since 1984 Austin: Texas University Press, p. 86.
37
Rather than being grounded in the specifics of regional politics or concerned with
enacting incremental change, as were the BAW/TAF and even the Chicano movement
before it, this portable border addressed a broader audience. In doing so, border artists
considered everyone to be a potential dweller, regardless of physical location. For these
artists, the border could be a state of mind as well as a boundary between nations; in the
most extreme theorization, the border occurs wherever there are places of coexisting
cultural or social difference. IIbid., p. 60.
38
tienne Balibar at Topology: Spaces of Transformation: Borders at Tate Modern, 5 th
November 2011, transcript mine. Tate Modern Museum (2011) Topology: Spaces of
Transformation: Borders. Available at: www.tate.org.uk (Accessed: 20 January 2016).
39
Steyn, J. and Stamselberg, N. (2014) Breaching Borders: Art, Migrants and the Metaphor
of Waste London: I.B.Tauris, p. 73.
Adorno warned that dwelling, in the proper sense, is now impossible. Moreover, he tells
40
place or as a making of place and even feeling at home [] (feeling at home in the context
of art making, being confortable and familiar with). Markiewicz, L. (2007) No Place Like
Home, in Durrant, S. and Lord, C. M. (2007) Essays in Migratory Aesthetics: Cultural
8
In the impossibility of finding a fixed place in a world whose national
boundaries (although still important) are relativized42 and where the
experience of decentredness becomes central43, the willingness of Live Art
practices to research into the notion of borders (geographical, cultural,
medium-based, relational, to name only a few) and dwell in that shifting
space, reminds us of the relation between building and dwelling in Martin
Heiddeger.44 In Heideggers thinking we live within an event, the Modern
one, which is constantly in the process of becoming outside the frame of
instrumental reasons. For him, to build something within this continuous
process is not a means toward dwelling but in its double meaning of
cultivate and aedificare building is already dwelling.45 Thus building is
inextricable from dwelling, and space designates something that has been
made room for, something [] within a boundary,46 in which boundary is
something that does not stop but is that from which something begins its
presencing [] Space is in essence that for which room has been made,
that which is let into its bounds.47
Artists working with Live Art seek and sit in this space where boundaries
commence presence, and Live Art practices produce, let appear (to use
Heideggers choice of words), what was not there before, where letting-
appear means bringing something made, [] something present among
the things that are already present.48 In this partial version of Heideggers
intricate text, the conclusions are that the nature of building, within a
constant process of becoming, is letting dwell because only if we are
capable of dwelling only then we can build.49 Live Art, working (building)
Practices Between Migration and Art-Making Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V, p. 5 and p.
37.
42
In the passage to the Empire, national space loses its definition, national boundaries
(although still important) are relativized, and even national imaginaries are destabilized. As
national sovereignty is displaced by the authority of the new supranational power, Empire,
political reality loses its measure. In this situation, the impossibility of representing the
people becomes increasingly clear and thus the concept of the people itself tends to
evaporate. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2002) Globalisation and Democracy, in Enwezor, O.,
Basualdo, C., Bauer, U.M., Ghez, S., Maharaj, S., Nash, M., and Zaya, O. (2002)
Democracy Unrealized, Documenta 11_Platform 1 catalogue Kassel: Hatje Cantz
Publishers, p. 326.
43
Markiewicz, L. (2007) No Place Like Home, in Durrant, S. and Lord, C. M. (2007) Essays
in Migratory Aesthetics: Cultural Practices Between Migration and Art-Making Amsterdam:
Editions Rodopi B.V, p. 38.
44
Heidegger, M. (1971) Poetry, Language, Thought New York: Harper Colophon Books.
45
The Old English and High German word for building, baun, means to dwell. This signifies:
to remain, to stay in place. The real meaning of the verb bauen, namely, to dwell, has been
lost to us. But a covert trace of it has been preserved in the German word, Nachbar,
neighbour. The neighbour is in Old English the neahgehur, neah, near, and gebur, dweller.
[] The way in which you are and I am, the manner in which we humans are on the earth, is
Bauan, dwelling. Ibid., pp. 144-145.
46
Ibid., p. 152.
47
Ibid.
48
Ibid., p. 157.
49
Ibid.
9
within the space of borders that have been relativized50, made disjointed
and portable51 attempts to let that space appear in order to create new
knowledge. In this creation of knowledge and in its working at the very
centre of decentred borders, we can see how Live Art makes them
productive as in Mezzadra and Neilsons political theory approach52 in
a restless research for openness, metamorphosis, multimediality and
dialogue with different audiences, spaces, and times.
Sitting both at the borders of the art market and within a constant process
of research, Live Art presents as central what for Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri is the excessive and monstrous power of invention of the
flesh, which is the primary material to investigate possibilities of
counterbalancing the capitalistic world-system they call Empire. The flesh
is pure potentiality, the unformed stuff of life, an element of being. [...]
What acts on the flesh and gives it form are the powers of invention, those
powers that work through singularities to weave together hybridizations of
space and metamorphoses of nature the powers, in short, that modify
the modes and forms of existence.53
Live Art creates the possibility to exceed the space of the artwork, flood
into public spaces, and rethink those spaces and our relationship with
borderline concepts and places. It seems that Live Art with its complexity
could be seen as a borderscape, as a space that is represented, perceived
and lived-in, as a fluid field of a multitude of political negotiations, claims,
and counterclaims; [] zone of variated and differentiated encounters []
as a way of thinking through, about, and of alternatives to dominant
landscapes of power.54
If for Mezzadra and Neilson the border can be a method precisely insofar
as it is conceived of as a site of struggle,55 we might dare to say that -
when it explicitly engages with the geographical borders between states,
and when it dwells on other human, social, political, artistic issues - Live
Art can be a method precisely insofar as it is conceived of as a site of
border-struggle.
50
Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2002) Globalisation and Democracy, in Enwezor, O., Basualdo,
C., Bauer, U.M., Ghez, S., Maharaj, S., Nash, M., and Zaya, O. (2002) Democracy
Unrealized, Documenta 11_Platform 1 catalogue Kassel: Hatje Cantz Publishers, p. 326.
51
Sheren, I. N. (2015) Portable Borders. Performance Art and Politics on the U.S. Frontera
since 1984 Austin: Texas University Press.
52
Mezzadra, S. and Neilson, B. (2013) Borders As Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor
Durham and London: Duke University Press.
53
Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2002) Globalisation and Democracy, in Enwezor, O., Basualdo,
C., Bauer, U.M., Ghez, S., Maharaj, S., Nash, M., and Zaya, O. (2002) Democracy
Unrealized, Documenta 11_Platform 1 catalogue Kassel: Hatje Cantz Publishers, pp. 334-
335.
54
Buoli, A. (2013) Envisioning Euro-Mediterranean Borderscapes. Interplays of Actors,
Networks and Landscape practices. Available at:
https://futureresearchideas.wordpress.com (Accessed: 19 April 2016).
55
Mezzadra, S. and Neilson, B. (2013) Borders As Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor
Durham and London: Duke University Press, p.18.
10
Some of the key resources these reflections are based on:
Pbl = Publication; Art= Article; DF= Digital File; DlC=Digital link/Conference; DfC=Digital
file/Catalogue; DlA= Digital link/Article-interview
Additional resources
Art The Portable Border: Site- Claire F. Fox Social Text, No.
Specificity, Art, and the U. 41 (Winter,
S.-Mexico Frontier, 1994 1994), pp. 61-
82.
11
INTERVIEWS: Live Art, Crossings, Europe
Running from February 2016 to February 2017, each month the blog
publishes an interview with an artist, academic or art professional, as a
way to open up the debate on what the contemporary meaning of border
in Live Art is and how artists are addressing this issue within Europe.
56
Giunta, C. (2016) The Universal is Back, Radical Philosophy 192 (3), p. 64.
12
movement to try and save themselves, in order not to overlook precious
memories of an ongoing narrative of pain and struggle within and across
state borders. On their part, Natasha Davis and Sarah Zaltash start from a
personal reflection on geography and routes to address broader issues
related to their own body, space, and the engagement of fellow travellers.
The following interviews aim to map some of the ways in which Live Art
has been engaging with the present and can open up ways for the new.
Interviewees:
Additional resources
57
Groys, B. (2016) In the Flow London: Verso, p.137.
58
Groys, B. (2016) In the Flow London: Verso, p.7.
13
Type Title Author Reference
14
LOIS KEIDAN | FEBRUARY 2016
AC: The border has been the centre of attention for many artists
think for example about Guillermo Gmez-Pea, Francis Als, and
Tania El Khoury. Artists have been challenging both physical borders
and the borders between disciplines, genders, traditions, spaces.
What is in your opinion the relation between Live Art and borders?
LK: Live Art is a way to break down borders and boundaries within artistic
disciplines, and a way to disrupt and rethink hierarchies. Live Art is able to
cross boundaries between art and politics and cross not only conceptual
borders but also physical ones, due to its site specificity and
responsiveness to its contexts and audiences and its non dependence on
language or much of the paraphernalia of art or theatre or dance.
LK: There is not much that I am aware of at the moment, and maybe it is
too soon for artists to respond. However I can think of the work of
organisations such as Counterpoints Arts, Index on Censorship, Tania
15
Brugueras Immigrant Movement International, and the collective Between
the Borders based in Liverpool. From my limited experience what artists
and others based in the UK are doing in response to the European
situation seems more immediate and practical than conceptual. It is about
getting resources to the Jungle in Calais and organising petitions to local
Councils demanding homes for refugees. Im not so aware of artworks or
projects that are in direct response to the crisis.
LK: We partly do that internally three members of the LADA team have
their own practice Alex Eisenberg is an independent curator and
producer, Katy Baird is an artist and curator, Aaron Wright is an
independent curator. But we also collectively keep our eyes open and are
constantly thinking about what we should be representing and stocking on
Unbound. With the Study Room, how we acquire materials and undertake
research is much broader we always ask Study Room users to
recommend titles and subjects that we should have and respond to that
feedback. So for example, recently a Study Room user said that we didnt
have material on motherhood so we approached artists that we know are
doing work around that subject. They sent us their reading lists, we
acquired these titles and also commissioned one of them to write a Study
Room Guide on the subject. We also try to involve the overall community
by opening up the Study Room on evenings and weekends through our
new Study Room Ambassador Scheme, and by having Study Room Boxes
or Unbound stalls at festivals and events.
AC: The Live Art Development Agency has always had strong links
with the US performance scene while also developing a network in
Europe. In the past few years you have been participating in European
festivals such as the Venice International Performance Art Week. Are
there in your opinion differences in approach, practices and
audiences receptions in your European experiences? I am thinking
for example at the Venice Performance Art Week and at the
concluded experience (at least in its form until 2015) of the Month of
16
Performance Art-Berlin, in comparison for example to Performa in
New York.
LK: I think that the way they are structured and supported are different.
Artists, curators, thinkers and writers, are the same in Europe and the US
because they are likeminded people, and are all connected with each
other in terms of thinking about what art can be or can do and why it is
important. I think those things are sort of interchangeable, but the
conditions in which artists are having to work are very different and I think
in the UK experimental ways of working are increasingly more accepted to
the point of a sort of institutionalization. The fact that there are so many
academic courses and research and publishing projects related to
performance is staggering compared to thirty years ago. The fact that Tate
Modern opened Tate Tanks and even the way they are talking about the
new building as a performative space and a place that people will
experience reflects the institutionalization of performance. The Manchester
International Festival, and other institutional frameworks now recognise
and embrace the interdisciplinary experiential possibilities of Live Art, if not
Live Art. Whilst there are courses in universities across the US, and
performance studies began at NYU, there is possibly not so much
happening at an institutional level beyond New York and Los Angeles. I
think that is partly to do with the US funding model. It is just very
challenging for artists and curators to generate funding for this kind of
work.
One interesting thing that is happening within performance art, and this is
going back to your first question, is that performance art when it first
began if one can say such a thing came about as a sort of rejection of
the dominance of the art world way of working. It was about rejecting the
art market, rejecting the commodification of art, and anti-
institutionalisation it was about artists experiences not about the market.
What it is interesting is that, because there has been this huge resurgence
of interest in performance art in the recent years, there is now a generation
of young artists who are making performance art for the art market and I
think that is happening increasingly within European, UK and US contexts
(just look at the presence of performance in most major art fairs)
AC: Your ongoing project Restock, Rethink, Reflect has concluded its
series about Live Art and feminism in 2015 and, if I am not wrong,
2016 will see the beginning of a two-year series of events, reflections
and publications on Live Art and class. Do you think that the UK Live
Art scene and its responses to the UK class system has been
17
impacted by the arrival of migrants, refugees and the current debate
about remaining or not in the EU? How? What are other LADAs
projects in the pipeline for this year?
LK: All these issues will inevitably come into that project but we are still at
a very early stage. We had a Study Room gathering about it, that was
really a broad ranging discussion about questions of privilege actually and
whether Live Art is its own privilege.
Additional resources
19
TANIA EL KHOURY | MARCH 2016
Alessandra Cianetti: Lets start from why you are here in London
today 29th February. You are presenting the project Gardens Speak at
the Battersea Arts Centre whose website describes it as an
interactive sound installation containing the oral histories of 10
ordinary people who have been buried in the gardens of Syrian
homes. Each narrative has been carefully constructed with the friends
and family members of the deceased to retell their stories as they
themselves would have recounted it. Gardens Speak was first
presented at Artsadmin in 2014 and then has been touring in
Australia, the UK, Germany and Romania. Do you think the work and
its reception has been changing over the years due also to the
increasing exacerbation of the Syrian conflict?
Tania El Khoury: The show at Artsadmin was a preview of only two days
just to test it out as the work is interactive, and needed to be tested with
an audience. We had colleagues and friends coming to Artsadmin to see
the work and from then we developed it further, taking into consideration
peoples opinions on the general experience, but also on technical stuff
around the instructions because this show happens without a performer,
and the audience activates the piece. The BAC shows are the first public
opening in London and it runs from the 2nd to the 19th of March.
Gardens Speak has been touring and since last year it has been picked up
more, and this is a work whose reception depends on the space and the
place it is shown. There is a big interest in Syrian peoples stories. I think
there is a need for stories of individual people living in Syria. Therefore,
some people feel that this piece is timely. I showed it in Munich where
there is a huge population of Syrian asylum seekers; it felt relevant to show
Gardens Speak there because many Syrians came to see it and engaged
with it, but there were also many people from Munich who wanted to know
more about the situation in Syria. The piece reminded us what and who is
behind what in Europe is now called the Refugees Crisis. How did people
become refugees in the first place? This piece is mainly about the first
periods in the Syrian uprising and tells the stories of people who
participated in protests whether they called themselves revolutionaries,
activists or just normal people who were helping and were all
consequently killed by the regime. It is actually important to remember
that. Since 2013, I had many interviews with people, activists, and artists
from Syria and the ten stories that are part of Gardens Speak were mainly
told to myself and the Syrian writer Keenana Issa by close friends and
families of the deceased.
TEK: I met various people in Munich and not all of them were keen to tell
their stories for various reasons. Some people had just arrived and were
worried about talking about what had happened to them and by that
maybe endanger family members who are still in Syria. Others were
worried about their legal status in Munich because in many situations there
are details you focus on and others you might not tell to the authorities,
the narratives you share with your friends are definitely different from the
ones you tell to the authorities of the country you would like to be hosted
by; there are various and conflicting narratives at play in these situations.
In the end I worked with three people who were willing to tell us their
stories. Their identity was hidden and it was an open process; they chose
how to present their stories. We built a relationship with the participants,
as they understood that I come first from a position of solidarity rather than
from a journalistic approach.
I dont think that the passage from more autobiographical works to pieces
such as Gardens Speak and Stories of Refuge is a change in my politics in
terms of being against borders and being against discrimination over
borders, but now there is more urgency in discussing this because people
are actually fleeing wars in which a lot of these big governments are
involved directly or indirectly. There is a human responsibility, a political
responsibility and an artistic responsibility to respond from the point of
view of the people telling their stories.
AC: You are the co-founder of the Dictaphone group that, with your
colleague researcher and architect Abir Saksouk, re-questions, as
citizens, the relationship to the space of the city, with a focus on
public spaces. How have notions of citizens and boundaries between
public and private been addressed by the work of your group in its
recent works?
The relationship between the Lebanese people and the sea is a common
theme of many of our projects where we see access to the sea as a human
right. This project we run with youth groups and activists was also about
telling stories of spaces through peoples past and current uses of public
spaces on the seashore. We also opened questions about the future of
these spaces, reimagining them and imagining how peoples relationship
with them might change because of the construction plans. We are also
working on a city walk in Beirut called Topography of Descent, which took
place in an area that has been experiencing urban transformation. The
streets we took the audience through have old houses that are threatened
by demolition. And the previously co-existing social classes will now
change with the rise of skyscrapers. Again, we tell the stories of contested
spaces and contested events through the stories of marginalised groups
and individuals.
22
lecture performance that explores borders within Lebanon, those between
Lebanon and its neighbours, and across the Arab world.
AC: Talking about Live Art scenes, I wonder what you think have been
performers responses in Lebanon or Syria to the current situation.
Are there any of your colleagues or any projects you would like to
highlight?
TEK: I cannot think of names at the moment but I would like to see more
involvement by artists. I know that there are a lot of artists that are
physically going to places such as the Calais jungle for example to support
refugees and that is of course very much needed. But I feel that it would
also be interesting to see artists engaging with local politics in their own
countries, discussing or opening up questions about their governments
stands on refugees and also not taking them into yet another war. There is
a lot of disconnection between what people and artists feel about borders,
citizenship and refugees, and what governments are actually doing by
closing off the borders, proposing changes to refugee status, which would
be dangerous in the short and long term. I would like for this to be
questioned and challenged in the arts. In Lebanon now probably half of the
population is made up of refugees, so there is a lot of artists work done in
collaboration with them. I dont know whether they define themselves as
Live Artists but there is a theatre group called Zoukak who have been
doing work in collaboration with refugees. There are also Syrian theatre
makers who do projects in refugee camps in Lebanon such as the
playwright Mohammad Al Attar.
AC: What are you up to this year? What are you coming projects?
TEK: There is a work that Im going to present in June at the Royal Court
Theatre in London in which I am collaborating with a Palestinian Syrian
23
artist that is called As far as my fingertips take me. It is a one-on-one
installation performance, a sort of conversation that takes place between
an audience member and a refugee through a wall. It is a commission by
LIFT festival 2016 and the Royal Court Theatre happening on 9, 10 and 11
June.
24
To know more about Tania El Khoury's practice:
Pbl = Publication; Art= Article; DF= Digital File; DlC=Digital link/Conference; DfC=Digital
file/Catalogue; DlA= Digital link/Article-interview
25
NURIA GUELL | APRIL 2016
Translated by Iberia Perez and Rosa Perez Monclus with Brian Stone.
Nria Gell: Like all my projects, this one emerges from a personal
discomfort regarding the collective. Some of my previous projects
consisted of subverting the immigration law. Specifically, in searching for
ways to legalize people who are illegalized through this law, by relying on
the socially acquired privileges I have for being a Spanish citizen, white,
and an artist. This is a reality that speaks to me for various reasons. On the
one hand, because of all the atrocities being committed at borders, and to
top it all that are justified in our name, for our security. On the other, this
has affected me personally for many years because my partner is Cuban
and, because he doesnt hold an EU passport, state officers who are alien
to our lives get to decide when we can be together and when we cannot.
Then I was invited to make a specific project related to the concept of
Europe, and this is where the project Aptrida por voluntad propia
(Stateless by Choice) originated.
NG: This project was very interesting because it took place without
actually being carried out. It is a project I worked on with the Cuban artist
Levi Orta. At a formal level, it consisted of a white car decorated with
fascist and Francoist motifs parked in a private car park near the central
square of Figueras. Every two hours the car would have gone for a ride
around the square and back to the parking lot, creating an uncomfortable
presence and taking an absurd route. The project aimed at rethinking
Francos ideology and fascist attitudes today, which like a ghost haunt
this country without memory. We consider it is timely and necessary to
reflect upon the rise of fascism that manifests itself in different forms
from institutional policies that segregate and kill, to the multiple attacks by
neo-Nazi groups, both in Fortress Europe and in our own homes. But the
most interesting thing was that the city mayor, a representative of a
27
Catalan nationalist party, censored the project. This generated a Streisand
effect in social media that made the project work even though the car
never left the parking lot. At the same time, it resignified the project and
made it more relevant. As the title Ideologas Oscilatorias (Oscillatory
Ideologies) suggests: sometimes it is not only a question of ideology or the
colours of the flag, but of the essence of power within old political
frameworks. Levi and I are grateful to the mayor for her involuntary
collaboration in the project.
NG: We set up a small legal service, like any other, but in this case with a
rebellious, disobedient nature. Troika Fiscal Disobedience Consultancy
gives support to citizens and European collectives to enable fiscal
disobedience to the Troika. We based our work on conceptual invoices.
Its really simple: for example, lets imagine you are a Greek collective that
does not want their tax to finance the Troika and would rather see that
money be used for the common good. So, when its time to do your taxes
and you need to pay VAT to the state, lets say 1,000.00, you can hire our
legal services. You just need to contact us via email, telling us that you
want to be disobedient for that amount. In this case, the price of our
service, basically giving you advice through our email, will be of 1,000.00
plus 8%. We will make two invoices. The first one with the 8% that you
need to pay us (1% of that is used to support the legal practice and the
remaining 7% is transferred to a common fund to be used in emergency
projects agreed by an assembly composed by range of European artists).
Once you have paid the first invoice we will send you the second, for an
amount of 1,000.00. The friendliness and solidarity that characterize our
fiscal consultancy means we will never claim payment of the second
invoice. In this way, you will be able to balance your VAT, resulting in 0 to
be paid to the state, being able to use that money for projects and social
services that austerity policies have annihilated. This is just an example but
there are plenty more; I encourage you to contact our legal services if you
want to pursue fiscal disobedience to the Troika. You can rest assured
because our fiscal consultancy is registered with a very common name.
This project is based on making use of market laws in the EU single
market to subvert the inhuman concept that its leaders have of the Union.
Yes, many European citizen and organisations are contacting our legal
practice. In fact, we have been open for a month and have had more
interest than we could have imagined.
28
Within my works trajectory, I understand it as a project forming part of an
operational method that I call Replica analtica crtica (Critical analytical
replica), which consists of replicating within the artistic space the
quintessential space for reflection a phenomenon already present within
the social and the political sphere. This framework acts as an augmenting
lens allowing us to analyse from a critical perspective the nuances of what
has been normalized in our day-to-day and through the activity of the
media. In this case we use similar strategies to those used by the tax
advisors of big neoliberal corporations in order to avoid taxes for their
clients, but in this case we have the objective of reverting them to the
common good. A good part of my projects and art work are citizens
resources that people can use and replicate. I also tend to use the space
of visibility that art grants me and hand it over to others. In this case,
somehow this is also fulfilled: the project amplifies the voice of many
activists that are fighting through economic disobedience. In fact, they are
now the ones managing the Troika Fiscal Disobedience Consultancy.
NG: Yes, absolutely. I believe that it is only by living, the way we choose to
be in the world, that we can trigger macro-political changes. Only through
micro-political changes we can defy and change structures. Let me
explain: even if macro-political ideas are brilliant, if we do not change
ourselves, they will only be conducive to a rearrangement of the state of
things. I believe the key is to displace the discourse of the Master, and
with this I mean the colonial and capitalist unconscious with which weve
been inculcated, the power devices that through law and morals amputate
what is singular in each one of us, creating standardized desires that only
respond to their needs. Only through this displacement can we force
ourselves to reinvent reality and allow ourselves not to be subjected to the
diktat of Integrated Global Capitalism. At the same time, I believe that if
the problem is financial and macro-political, we need to devise responses
at this same level, as for example what we are trying to do with Troika
Fiscal Disobedience Consultancy. But this can only work if people become
involved at a micro-political level, in this case using the service.
For me, the role of performance and artistic expression is to use the space
of freedom that characterises art, through strategies and counter-devices,
to engender moments of ethical enquiry that allow us to rethink ourselves
as society. They need to open the ground for allowing critical distance,
29
displacing the discourse of the Master and questioning internalized
identifications.
AC: Your practice walks the border between art and activism, how do
you balance these two aspects of your work? I noticed that Cuban
installation and performance artist Tania Bruguera features among
your mentors. How do you feel she influenced your thinking as an
artist?
AC: Along with the financial crisis started in 2008, the current
refugees crisis, and threatens to the Schengen agreement, the very
project of a European identity seems to have failed. From your work
we can see that you are definitely critical of this institutional approach
to identity and I wonder whether you can recognise this feeling in
other live and visual artists that are now working in Europe or about
what is happening in Europe. Do you think that is there a response
from the art world to this current issues? If so, which artists or
projects would you look at?
NG: Yes, in social media you can see many artists and intellectuals
rethinking the concept of Europe from a critical perspective. Due to time
constrains I am not following contemporary art responses closely. I am
more focused on analysing those movement at an institutional level in
order to be able to understand what the best response would be. In terms
of referents, I am interested in psychoanalytic discourse analysis and
decolonial contributions. From and active perspective, I am involved in
activism, beyond my artistic practice.
AC: To conclude please, tell us more about your coming projects this
year, are you working on something new?
NG: Yes, now I am working in a project of dis/un-nationalization entitled
Rambo. I have been invited to do a project in New York, as you know the
US military gives motivational talks/conferences to students in high school
to increase their recruitment. It is based on nationalist concepts such as
loyalty to the nation, using it as a sacred cause to justify the unjustifiable.
30
My proposal is based on replicating the same talks, but in this case the
speaker will be a veteran form the Iraq war, who has become an
antimilitarist referent. The objective is to rethink the concept of
homeland/nation with students from a critical perspective of collective
engagement, far from irrational and uncritical principles that patriotism and
nationalism frequently rely upon.
Additional resources
31
HELENA WALSH | MAY 2016
HW: Live Art in an Irish context is a very diverse and exciting area of
practice. While there are a number of different approaches and processes
deployed by Live Artists, duration has been a significant feature of
performative works on the island of Ireland since the 1970s. In particular,
within an Irish context artists have used durational performance to create
spaces where trauma and the difficulty surrounding its representation can
be approached and thought. For example, in some of his early durational
performances, Alastair McLennan, explored the traumatic impact and
human cost of the conflict in Northern Ireland, commonly called The
Troubles. This conflict began in the late 1960s when tensions escalated
between the nationalist-Catholic and unionist-Protestant communities
following Civil Rights marches, which challenged the social inequalities
experienced by the Catholic minority. The inflammation of longstanding
disagreements over the political status of Northern Ireland, stemming from
the partition of Ireland, led to a prolonged period of violence involving
Republican and Loyalist paramilitary groups, alongside British military and
security forces. The violence of the Troubles was quelled with the gradual
development of the Northern Irish Peace Process during the 1990s, which
saw the establishment of a power-sharing system of governance
representing both unionists and nationalists. The Peace Process coincided
with a period of unprecedented economic growth in the Irish Republic,
referred to as the Celtic Tiger. This followed Irelands joining of the
European Union in 1973 and its attracting of foreign, largely American,
technology and pharmaceutical companies to base their European
operations in The Republic through implementing low-tax policies. The
prosperity enabled during the Celtic Tiger era, however, was short-lived
given the Republic of Irelands economic collapse in 2010, which, of
course, was related to the global economic crash in 2008.
Following the turn of the millennium there has been an increased use of
duration by individual Live Art practitioners and within collective durational
exhibitions across the island of Ireland. On one hand, the processes of
repetition and duration allow an examination of a sense of sameness or
repetition that pervades Irish cultural history, the continuation of
oppression, violence and economic hardship. Of course, the long-standing
33
ceasefire and the development of the Power Sharing executive in Northern
Ireland has quelled the extremity of the violence experienced during the
Troubles and dramatically changed the political landscape. However, the
Peace Process has been far from smooth and remains very much in
process. The temporalities of durational performance, perhaps, allow
space to engage with the development of this process across time and to
approach the traumas of the past that continually haunt the present. The
increased deployment of repetition and duration in contemporary Live Art
is also significant to the recovery of a broader past that came following the
progression of the Northern Irish Peace Process. As detailed in the Live Art
Development Agency Study Guide, Brutal Silences: Live Art and Irish
Culture co-authored by Ann Maria Healy and myself, a number of Live
Artists have deployed the processes of repetition and duration to respond
to the silencing of wide-scale institutional abuse. The occurrence of abuse
within state-sanctioned Catholic institutions in the post-colonial Irish state
entered into public discourse in the 1990s. The abuse of children by
Catholic clergy within Industrial and Reformatory Schools, alongside the
enslavement of women inCatholic-run Magdalen Laundries, which
remained in operation until 1996 in the Republic, was suppressed for
decades. The Irish state was complicit in the longevity of these abuses
through sustaining these institutions and failing to intervene. Yet the
implementing of a gagging clause as a condition of state redress for
those who suffered abuse demonstrates further attempts to silence and
suppress. Human rights abuses also occurred in institutions in Northern
Ireland, where Magdalen Laundries were also in operation and abuse in
childrens homes and residential institutions between 1922 and 1995 is
being investigated as part of the Inquiry into Historical Institutional Abuse
in Northern Ireland. Crucially, durational performance has been used very
effectively to operate against the silencing of trauma within political
discourses focused on narrating the past towards neat ends or a tidy
conclusion. Live Artists have used the processes of repetition and duration
to bring those bodies lacking resolution into view and encourage a
questioning of how the traumas embedded in our collective histories
continually trouble the present.
34
AC: Your investigations have been addressing notions of class
struggle, migration, labour, and postcolonial discourses as we can
see for example in the work Containing Crisis that you performed at
The National Famine Museum in Strokestown, Ireland. What is your
approach to the relations among Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland
and the city you live in, London? How have these reflections on
geography and power struggles have shaped your practice?
HW: The exploration of class struggles, labour and migration within post-
colonial contexts have been central to many of my projects in recent years.
For example, in 2011, I was invited to make a performance at the National
Famine Museum of Ireland, which is housed in the stables of Strokestown
Park House, a former colonial estate in Co. Roscommon. Strokestown
Park House is a Palladian-style mansion that was built by Thomas Mahon
MP (1701-1782). The estate was built on lands given to Mahons
grandfather, Nicholas, in the 17th century for his support of the British
colonial campaign. Estates such as Strokestown Park House are
commonly referred to as the big house. My performance, Containing
Crisis, was durational, taking place over two days in the servants kitchen
of the big house, which is the only remaining galleried kitchen in Ireland.
With my excessive cooking and spoiling of potatoes during the
performance I considered the relationship between shortage and surplus,
evoked by the big house and its controversial role during the Great Irish
Famine (1845-51). The sense of excessiveness and abjectness within my
actions responded to the enormity of the crisis provoked by the Great Irish
Famine, which resulted in mass emigration from Ireland and the death of
one million people from starvation and disease. The themes of surplus and
shortage were also used to consider the sense of triumph inherent in the
nationalist commemoration of the Famine during the Celtic Tiger era. The
150th anniversary of the Famine coincided with Irelands economic growth
during the 1990s and the commemorative events at this time greatly
surpassed previous commemorative events. Relevant to this, the National
Famine Museum opened in 1994.
AC: Your are one of the founding members of the collective Speaking
of I.M.E.L.D.A., an intergenerational group of artists and activists that
lobby for the right of Irish women to be allowed to have abortions; at
the moment illegal practices in both the Republic of Ireland and
Northern Ireland. Would you mind to talk a bit about the groups work
and how do you interpret the relation between activism and political
Live Art practices?
That is not to say that Live Artists should not respond by making political
interventions that challenge the inadequate stance of governments in
response to the refugee crisis, alongside resisting the moves to shut down
borders and the negative characterising of refugees within political
discourses. I certainly think that there needs to be much more dialogue
around the current refugee crisis and what is happening on the ground
across mainland Europe, particularly in contexts such as the UK and
Ireland, where due to geographical distance, politicians attempt to frame
the crisis as happening somewhere else so as to evade responsibility to
take meaningful action.
AC: Along your practice as an artist, you are also a researcher whose
work focuses on Irish feminists and activists from the Sixties
onwards: what have changed since then in your opinion on the ways
activists are advocating for women rights? Are there practices that
could be shared site-specifically in different country and still be
effective?
HW: Firstly, I would say that while there are certain differences and shifts
in the ways activists advocate for womens rights, I particularly value
working within an inter-generational network such as Speaking of
I.M.E.L.D.A where older and younger feminist activists can share
knowledge and learn from one another.
Certainly, I think that contemporary activism around womens rights is
greatly informed by the actions and experiences of our feminist
predecessors and, particularly, within Speaking of I.M.E.L.D.A. our work is
strengthened through intergenerational input. It is equally strengthened
through the development of international solidarities and discussions with
activists fighting for reproductive rights in different global contexts. One of
the biggest changes in how activists are advocating for womens rights is
perhaps through the use of social media. Feminist activists have been
actively harnessing social media to build networks, share information,
discuss issues, plan events and actions and also share documentation of
interventions across sites and borders. In many ways social media makes
it easier to organise and disseminate information quickly. However, I feel,
at the same time, it is important to deploy direct actions and interventions
in order to actively confront and unsettle oppressive power structures.
There is a power in collective action and collective presence. Within
Speaking of I.M.E.L.D.A., alongside directly challenging politicians, we
40
have raised the issue of abortion at events associated with Irishness, for
example St. Patricks Day, The Rose of Tralee and the Irish State visit to
Britain. In persistently intervening and inserting the issue of abortion into
these events we operate against the hypocritical attempts of the Irish
government to turn a blind eye to the exporting its duty of care towards its
citizens to England and the fallacies in its claims that Ireland is abortion
free. Collective intervention has been effective in numerous campaigns for
social justice and, in my view, remains so today.
Helena Walsh is an Irish Live Artist who has been based in London since
2003. Helena has performed widely in galleries, museums, theatres and
non-traditional art spaces, including public sites. In 2009 she received a
Doctorate Award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
to undertake a practice-based PhD in the Department of Drama, Queen
Mary University of London, which she completed in 2013. Over the course
of her doctoral research, she used Live Art as a methodology to investigate
the relations between gender, national identity and cultural history in an
Irish context. Helena is currently devising a new site-responsive Live Art
work that considers the activism of the women during the 1916 Rising, that
will feature in Future Histories at Kilmainham Gaol in 2016.
41
To know more about Helena Walsh's practice:
Pbl = Publication; Art= Article; DF= Digital File; DlC=Digital link/Conference; DfC=Digital
file/Catalogue; DlA= Digital link/Article-interview
Additional resources
42
Female Body, 2013
43
ALMIR KOLDZIC | JUNE 2016
Almir Koldzic: I cant think of one single point in time when I started being
interested in displacement. But it must have started with books and
literature. I do remember a moment during my studies in ex-Yugoslavia,
where I am from, when I came across an excerpt from James Joyces A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He was talking about exile, about
leaving what he called the traps of language, culture, religion, and I
remember as a young men being really impressed by it, loving the sense of
freedom and willingness to act and question the status quo that he was
describing there.
A few years later, in 1995 I came to London to study English literature and
wait for the war in Yugoslavia to end. My interest in exile and displacement
developed in a more personal way at that point, and has continued to
grow ever since.
AC: In terms of artists you have been collaborating with, I can see that
you have a wide range of contributors from many art practices and to
go back to the focus of this blog, Live Art, I can see that you have
been collaborating with Natasha Davis, the duo There There, and as
45
part of dis\placed 2015 with Richard DeDomenici and the Live Art
Development Agency on the panel Live Art and dis\placed chaired by
Lois Keidan. What do you think Live Art interventions add to the
explorations, research and projects Counterpoints Arts run? What
drove you towards this approach to addressing refugees voices?
Would you mind to telling me a bit more about the artists you have
been working with?
AK: We work in different ways and with different artists and we often work
collaboratively.
One example is our collaboration with Richard DeDomenici, whom I met
almost ten years ago, when he was looking for support for his refugee boy
band project. At first I thought his idea was crazy, but after an introduction
from Lois Keidan I had a few conversations with Richard, and we all then
ended up working on what became the Fame Asylum project and
documentary by Channel 4. What I loved about Richards approach is that
it was brave, provocative and funny which is not often the case with
projects that relate to refugees. He also had a clearly defined audience a
young female demographic who like cheesy pop and who can influence
their parents through pestering. I also loved the fact that Richard pissed
off lots of people on both sides of the refugee debate those who were
protective and/or found his approach exploitative and those who were
simply against refugees. He managed to provoke some great
conversations and responses without ever offering a simple answer
including whether the project was a good idea at all.
We have also worked with and supported Natasha Davis for a number of
years now. It has been great to see how her worked has continued to
evolve while identity and migration have remained her great concerns and
inspirations. Her approach to participatory auto/biography has opened
all kinds of wonderful conversations and responses at our various events
where she has performed. She also has a beautiful way of talking about
and interweaving her art and exilic experiences to the extent that we find
her a great ambassador and model for emerging artists.
In terms of other art forms, we have done a few projects where more
established British artists were brought to collaborate and perform with
emerging artists from migrant and refugee backgrounds. Last year, for
example, we organised an event at RichMix featuring Akala, who is quite
an eloquent and well-spoken UK hip-hop artist who has quite a big
following among young politically engaged people. He performed with a
Palestinian band Katibeh Khamseh and that really worked. It was a huge
deal for Katibeh Khamseh, who were suddenly performing to an audience
of four hundred young people in London.
Going back to the Live Art aspect of our various events, including
Insomnia which I mentioned earlier, there was always a clear sense that
Live Art performances were bringing a new dimension to the event. It was
literally about enlivening it; about bringing and engaging audiences,
inviting them to take part in an experience; about bringing down barriers,
as most often there is no stage or barrier between you and the performers.
Which means that you have to do something, to act in order to either
engage or ignore.
I will generalise here but I find that Live Art has a great potential to develop
and embody different ways of telling the stories of refugees and migrants
and to engage new audiences in the creative process of representing
these experiences.
However, as non-experts in this field, we do rely on the support of experts,
and it has been our great privilege to work over the years with LADA, who
have become our trusted partners and friends over the years.
AC: The second focus of performing borders is Europe. 2015 has been
the year when the migratory movements towards Europe of people
fleeing wars have been labelled the Refugees Crisis. We have the
Jungle in Calais, the debate about Brexit, queues of people hoping to
be granted asylum in the UK. In your opinion, is there a co-ordinated
response by arts organisations to addressing this crisis or do you
think is more a matter of single artists practices or arts
organisations projects that are actually addressing this issue? What
are some interesting realities in terms of both artists practices and
arts organisations in Europe at the moment for you?
We have seen that recently many more (arts) organisations and individuals
are choosing to do something in relation to refugees to what many
people consider to be one of the defining issues of our time. This was
especially obvious at our recent Refugee Week conference that attracted
an unprecedented number of people interested in doing something in this
context. There is also lots of interest this year from various European
countries to join in and organise their own Refugee Weeks which we are
keen to support and see happen.
So, I guess there are many other artists and projects around Europe
commenting on, responding to and exploring related themes. There is one
project in Sweden (LIVSTYCKET) that is using an interesting approach.
They focus on recently arrived refugees and help them develop language
skills. In the process, refugees are also involved in creative design
activities they draw, write, design, print, etc. after which their creations
48
are given to professional designers and turned into bags, T-shirts, and so
on. I like this approach because it addresses practical needs in
combination with the development of creative skills.
Finally, I can say that so far this period has produced the biggest interest I
have ever seen on the topic. What will come out of this is a big question,
but I hope that cumulatively all this work will lead towards some sort of
change, some sort of new openness. But it is too early to say.
AC: To conclude, what are the plans for Counterpoints Arts for 2016?
AK: A few highlights for this year include events at the Southbank Centre,
the British Museum and RichMix. We are also looking at commissioning
and working with some fantastic artists operating both nationally and
internationally. And later in the year, in October, we are going to organise
an Arts and Social Exchange in Dartington, which is very exciting because
it will be about bringing a number of people from different sectors and
worlds together to discuss the ways art and social change can intervene
and work in the context of migrants and refugees. We are exploring
possibilities for commissioning more artists to work across the country,
but thats the beginning of our conversation. And obviously from 20th to
26th June there is Refugee Week, whose theme this year is welcome,
celebrating the incredible acts of welcome shown to refugees by
communities and individuals across the UK and Europe.
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To know more about Almir Koldzic's work:
Pbl = Publication; Art= Article; DF= Digital File; DlC=Digital link/Conference; DfC=Digital
file/Catalogue; DlA= Digital link/Article-interview
50
NATASHA DAVIS | JULY 2016
I started making Rupture when I was diagnosed with cancer, during the
months when I had to make decisions on what kind of therapy and
interventions to choose, and then later during the initial six-month
recovery. From the first biopsy onwards, I worked with my doctors and
surgeons to document the process. I obtained a beautiful collection of
surgical instruments to create an interactive hanging installation, and made
a film of a large piece of meat being manipulated by my hands in surgical
gloves and long prodding needle-like instruments. I travelled back to
Natasha Davis and Yana Meerzon (2015), Staging an Exilic Autobiography, Performance
59
AC: Through your work, you walk and cross borders among media,
private stories and international tragic events, internal and external
emotional and physical landscapes. What other boundaries do you
think your practice crosses? Where do you see Live Art sitting within
your multi-disciplinary work?
ND: Its true that the work I make is interdisciplinary and that live
performances usually involve text, choreography, video, original sound and
other tools. Im also very interested in extracting installations out of my live
performances so that they can be experienced in galleries and
occasionally re-worked in these new environments to implement yet
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another live or participatory element. By employing this process I am
experimenting with the physical defragmentation of the performance
material and transforming it into something else, which resembles the
process of bodily integration into a new environment, when displacement
gradually gives life to a new form of existence for a migrant.
But the work is also cross-disciplinary and, as you noticed, often political
autobiography and personal histories are grounded in political contexts. In
terms of methods of working and inspiration regarding content, images,
ways of thinking I am constantly excited about reaching towards other
disciplines such as social and political studies, human rights issues,
medical science etc. I already mentioned collaborating with doctors in the
process of making Rupture. In Teeth Show, which I made after Internal
Terrains, I collaborated with two dental clinicians and a maxillofacial
surgeon to record a jaw operation on film. Starting with teeth as a
metaphor for roots, Teeth Show explores complexities around democratic
rights of the displaced body in transit and in a constant flux between
breaking and repairing. It asks how crossing borders and living in exile
impact on the rights of the body regarding its identity, citizenship and
medical status. It is a mixed-media, playful and harrowing examination of
who, and across what borders, may have access to beautiful and pain-free
teeth, and what options remain to those in precarious or transient
situations and those who are left out.
Live Art provides an excellent space for these interdisciplinary and cross-
disciplinary conversations and experiments, and allows me to work flexibly
between various art forms such as performance, installation, film and
publication solo and collaboratively, with professionals or with
participants who have never performed, in end-on seating or immersive
configurations, in traditional performance environments and site specific
locations, with art and science partners. Live Art and contemporary
performance allow for research and embodied experience to mix
organically and for new working methodologies to emerge from this mix.
AC: Looking at your work and also the difficult choice to acquire the
British citizenship (Rupture, 2009) after years of exile, made me think
of two artists that have been touching notions of citizenships,
displacement, and belonging connected with personal
autobiographical choices: Mona Hatoum and Nria Gell. In her solo
exhibition at Tate Modern (2016), we can see Hatoums Measures of
Distance (1988), a video-work of the artists mother taking a shower
with a soundtrack of the letters the artist received from Beirut. For
Hatoum her personal relationship becomes a way to speak of exile,
displacement, disorientation and tremendous sense of loss as a result
of the separation caused by war. Spanish Live Artist Nria Gell, in
her ongoing project Stateless by Choice, is following various legal
and research steps to get rid of her own citizenship. Gell aims to
53
acquire the stateless status to stand against both the structure of
the nation-state as a mode of political organisation and the fictitious
construction of the self in relation to the national identity. I wonder
how you relate to Hatoums work and in which way you would
respond to Gells.
ND: I think the work I make definitely relates to both artists and certainly
Mona Hatoums installations have occasionally provided direct inspiration.
For example the lighting installation that is central in demarcating the
performance space and the idea of home in Internal Terrains, consisting of
twenty cables with a light bulb at the end of each, comes from Hatoums
Undercurrent (2008), the difference being that I walk on the cables
throughout the performance, however uncomfortable or unbalancing that
may be, and interact with the bulbs. Considering we both experienced
exile with all the pain and pleasure associated with it, in the way that Said,
Lamming and Sebald have written about, it is not strange that a lot of the
imagery we use can appear dangerous or threatening and beautiful or
poetic at the same time, drawing attention to the loss and liberation in
equal measure.
All three of us make work that is both personal and political, however I
think Nria Gells work, at least the work I am familiar with, is more
directly political and activist in its nature. She also taps into the ideas
around mobility and the ease or hardship with which citizens of different
countries travel, which is something I have also looked at. In Asphyxia, one
episode compares what it is like to cross borders with a Croatian passport
and a British passport and asks why that is the case, considering that I am
still the same person, regardless of the passport I use. Hatoum, Gell and I
have made work that directly relates to the question of citizenship and
crossing borders, and perhaps my Citizenship film that appears in Rupture,
as you suggested, best illustrates shared research interests with these two
artists.
But the film also raises a series of questions around the citizenship itself.
What does it mean to live in a country, work and pay tax, but not be able
to vote or not feel safe about your legal status? How does it feel to
become a citizen of a country, be able to vote and feel safe, but disagree
with that country sending bombs that are falling very close to where your
family lives? What does it mean to pledge both to the Queen and to
democracy in one single, very short, oath? If the country decides to go into
a war, which majority of the public does not seem to wish to happen,
where is democracy? I made the film ten years after the NATO bombing of
Belgrade and other places in Serbia, and just a few years after the military
intervention in Iraq. The latter military intervention was executed after one
of the biggest mass demonstrations against it ever in the UK. Now of
course weve had it confirmed by Chilcot inquiry that the war was not
necessary at the time, as the peaceful options had not been exhausted
first, in addition to a dozen other very serious reasons.
ND: The imagery, even when disturbing, is often poetic and beautiful, at
least in an abstract way, and never there to shock. For example, in
Suspended, the meat minced through a grinder onto the white tablecloth,
is used as a dramaturgical tool and speaks directly, in the context of the
whole performance, of how grinding the process of exile and establishing
oneself legally in a new country can be. Its a very powerful, succinct and
visceral shortcut that can illuminate the difficulty of such a situation. As
you mentioned, I am in a very vulnerable position at the opening scene of
Suspended I am stuck, raised on a high structure, with all my hair tied
with more than 40 strings to theatre rigs, and if I were to fall all my hair
55
would be unrooted from my scalp. When the audience are silently invited
to cut my hair in order to free me into movement, everyone in the space
becomes hyper aware of what it is like to be stuck, in limbo, and how
carefully we need to work together so that nobody gets hurt. The
audience sometimes start cutting my hair immediately, sometimes it takes
a little while, but they are generally very careful, although there have been
cuts when the hair took longer to grow back! Strings are left to hang in the
space amongst the audience, with bits of my hair attached to the bottom
of each evoking the sensation that if someone is displaced from their
original environment a piece of them will always stay behind.
I wish to provide the time and space for encounters with the audience, the
time and space in which temporal and geographical, fragmented and
associative journeys, as well as experiences of losses and transformations
can be shared. In that sense the fragmentary nature of my work is also a
deliberate choice, not just a device referring to the way our thoughts return
to the past in which the displacement occurred. The fragments themselves
are arranged in such a way that the audience can emotionally connect
themselves to the material explored. In the trilogy the body of the
performer became the material signifier to which the audience attached
itself, whilst in Internal Terrains the objects as mnemonic devices became
the main tool connecting to and tapping into the recipients own
experience of loss, allowing us to look together for resolutions by
examining the wounds under the scars.
AC: During your long and productive career, you have been
collaborating with organisations such as Counterpoints Arts that
focuses on the contribution of refugees to the British cultural scene.
Would you mind saying a bit about your approach to this
collaboration?
All of the above for me as an artist is very important, as it means that I can
preserve my individuality and creative freedom whilst at the same time not
feel isolated in the issues that I explore. My creative performance, film and
installation work is personal and poetic, and not necessarily directly
political and activist, although it does become such in collaboration with
an organisation such as Counterpoints Arts, especially through platforms,
talks, workshops, conversations with public, and writing. Working with
Counterpoints Arts has also been one of the ways for me to take my
recent scholarly research out of the context of academia and into the
realm of public conversations about socially engaged, collaborative and
participatory practices. And I look forward very much to collaborating
further with them on mobilising forces to keep drawing attention to how
Europe can deal with the current situation and support migrants and
refugees.
AC: Please tell us a bit more about your plans for this challenging and
uncertain year for Europe-based artists.
Whilst in Melbourne with the British Council and Arts Council support
earlier this year, I started developing new performance material with
director and writer Alyson Campbell, this will also be a collaboration with a
stem-cell scientist and a martial artist choreographer, as well as my usual
team of artistic collaborators (Lucy Cash, Bob Karper and Marty
Langthorne). I will be developing it in London, with the material unrolling
gradually for the audience from next spring in collaboration with Rich Mix
and Colchester Arts Centre, who have also been my significant partner
venues for years. Partly I will also be working on it through a residency just
out of Stratford-upon-Avon, generously provided by Hosking Houses
Trust.
My documentary film Berlin-Sarajevo, which I have been making with a
Berlin based artist and film maker Nehra Stella, is currently in post-
production and I am hoping for it to be available to public from next year.
Using the context of the split of Germany into Eastern and Western parts
and its consequent re-unification/fall of the Berlin Wall, as well as the war
in the Balkans and particularly the history of Sarajevo since the early 90s
the film explores how it is possible that we sometimes feel as foreigners,
displaced in our own cities and countries, even if we have never left them.
Additional resources
59
MARILENA ZAROULIA | AUGUST 2016
61
A precarious dialogue Radical Philosophy (autumn 2013): 20.
60
the conditions for a new society, [] by rearranging the elements inherited
from the very institution that has to be overcome.62
What was created was a space of sharing work and a platform for
collaboration.63 More recently, in the summer of 2015, another space
Green Park was activated. Philip Hager and I have recently written about
the significance of these initiatives for the changing performance ecology
in the context of austerity Athens.64 What we feel is worthy of note in such
examples is the formation of a collective subject that is made up of many
individuals, whose friendship and labour produces this shared space and
subjectivity. Such ways of working do not seem to aim to a perpetual
existence or do not wish to become a new kind of institution, replacing the
old ones; in fact, they often fall apart or are replaced. But what remains is
a process that is yet to be completed, a willful resistant desire to the
neoliberal orthodoxy of productivity.
AC: Last year, in collaboration with Philip Hager, you co-edited the
publication Performances of Capitalism, Crises and Resistance. In
what way do you see performance (and Live Art if it entered your
research) as a means of resistance? What performance artists were
mentioned in this regard?
62
Etienne Balibar (2004) Europe: Vanishing Mediator? in We, the People of Europe?
Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Translated by James Swenson. Princeton:
Princeton UP. pp. 203-35. 233.
See also Gigi Argyropoulou (2012) Embros: Twelve thoughts fcxtfxon the rise and fall of
63
performance practice on the periphery of Europe Performance Research 17.6 (On Labour
& Performance), 56-62.
Philip Hager and Marilena Zaroulia (2017) Libres et dtermines: Performances a Athnes
64
Giulia Palladini (2015) The Weimar Republic and its Return: Unemployment, Revolution, or
65
We can think of excess as waste and question who or what constitutes the
waste of contemporary world; there are plenty of evocative images of
migrants crossing land and sea borders, where bodies en masse exceed
what Europe, purportedly, can accommodate. It is equally interesting to
look at objects that we associate with the migrants crossings as
performances of excess. For instance, the boats that migrants used, which
in visual arts are reframed as stands-in for their plight, or the piles of life
vests that are abandoned in the shores of Greek islands that are used as
primary material for installations like Ai Weiweis Safe Passage during the
2016 Berlin Film Festival.
Capitalism, Crises and Resistance, ed. by Marilena Zaroulia and Philip Hager. London:
Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 77-93.
63
that often exceed the limits of our comprehension or sensibility and
demand empathy.
AC: What are in your opinion at the moment the most interesting
performers, or artists, whose work is tackling notion of crisis,
resistance, migration, Europe and contemporary capitalism?
MZ: This is such a difficult question to answer, because of the plurality and
diversity of the European arts scenes as well as the porosity of European
borders. Who counts as European or even, does this question matter
anymore? In my work, I really try to move past the Eurocentric arguments
about the unique artistic traditions of Europe and recognize how Europes
colonial past has contributed to our contemporary understanding of
European identities and cultures.
MZ: Indeed; how interesting and terrifying times to think about the future
of Europe and the performing arts in the Continent. This is not only
because of Brexit and the immense, economic, socio-political and cultural
consequences that the British vote has already had and will continue to
have in Britain and across Europe. More broadly, we can see that Europe
is at a crossroads; the numerous terrorist attacks, the rise of demagogic
and fascist politics, the demonization of migrants and refugees, the EUs
inability to respond meaningfully to all these challenges as well as the
persistence of austerity policies make up a picture of distress, if not decay.
Of course, if we dont wish to perceive the world from a Eurocentric point
of view, we can all agree that European international politics and multiple
military interventions outside the borders of Europe have contributed to a
new age of fear.
AC: Tell us a bit more about your own future projects and the future of
Inside/Outside Europe Research Network.
MZ: During the next two years, I will be finally writing a book that I have
been thinking about for a few years. Its title is Encountering Europe on
British Stages: Performances, Policies and Affects since 1990 and its aim
is to consider the ways in which British theatre and performance have
engaged with ideas of Europe and European identities from the end of the
Cold War until the present. My starting point is that performance is a
space of encounter and the book will chart and theorize how in
performance, Britain and Europe have interacted through different modes
of encounter. The book will also discuss the ways in which European
cultural policies have affected and shaped the British theatre landscape
over the past quarter-century, contesting British isolation and island
mentality. Obviously, I will be writing the book as the negotiations on the
terms of Brexit will be unfolding but my hope is that this book will not be
only a product of its time but that it will offer a much broader perspective
on the Britain/Europe conundrum.
66
To know more about Marilena Zaroulia's work:
Pbl = Publication; Art= Article; DF= Digital File; DlC=Digital link/Conference; DfC=Digital
file/Catalogue; DlA= Digital link/Article-interview
Additional resources
67
SARA ZALTASH | SEPTEMBER 2016
Sara Zaltash: Ah-Be has several beginnings, which are disputed even in
my mind like any river, its sources are multiple, and each one is true. Ill
tell you the story I tell most people, which begins in October 2014, a
drama that unfolded when I was visiting my maternal grandmother in
Tehran. She was gently giving me a hard time for still being single. Im the
second eldest of her twelve grandchildren, after my sister who is the
eldest. Me, my sister and my younger brother grew up in England, the
Western world. We have much wilder expectations than my grandmother
about our love lives, who married my grandfather when she was fourteen
years old and had almost all of her six children by the time she was my
age. (Though, isnt that pretty wild in comparison to my university
romances and online dating disasters? Different jungle, I guess.) My
grandmother was saying that I was close to souring, the Farsi equivalent
of being left on the shelf. My sister, six years my elder, was already way
passed her sell by date, and my Nanna wanted a wedding before she got
too old to enjoy it. So I promised her that the next time I saw her I would
bring that special someone to meet her.
When I was small, my Nanna taught me the Farsi word for promise
ghol. It sounds a bit like ball in English. Playing along, she taught me by
rolling an imaginary ball across the rug while we promised silly things to
each other I promising to eat a hundred cream cakes, she promising to
cook my favourite shami kebabs. So, maybe twenty-two years later, when
I effectively promised to bring her my future husband (never mind that Im
bi, already divorced, have a waning belief in the institution of marriage, and
have for several years been more interested in long-term polyamory than a
lifetime of monogamy [even if that interest has been more academic that
pragmatic]) she looked at me with her chin slightly raised, an expression
which utterly characterises her soul in its expectation of defiance, and
asked me, Really? You promise? To which I immediately replied, Yes, of
course, I mean it, I promise. I may have even put my hand on my heart.
The cab I had been waiting for buzzed her third-floor apartment, cutting
into our moment like a spinning saw through steel rope. Afterwards,
oozing around Tehrans ill-judged internal autobahn network in the early
afternoon heat, I realised what I had done. I had promised my Nanna, my
68
only remaining grandparent, that the next time I saw her I would defy the
conventional romantic mundanities of Western millennial cosmopolitanism
and definitely, absolutely, soul-bindingly turn up with a husband. Oh dear.
So, a story began. In one day, I made two promises to my ancestors. One
to deliver the future, and another to release myself from the past. I would
walk to Iran, and bring my one true love to my grandmother. Another part
of the story began in October 2015 when I met a hydraulics expert, a
fellow Fellow of the Schumacher Institute, who was doing some
consultancy on a UN project in Iran called Hydrocity, which is addressing
the water crisis in the region by reopening a series of ancient underground
aqueducts called qanaats. I got his attention by inventing the broadcast
element of the performance-to-be on the spot during a coffee break at a
Fellows meeting. Another part of the story begins at around 3am on 7th
September 2013, the last day of my 100-day performance Sink or Sing,
two days after I had swam to Bestival while singing. My dear friend Ellie
Stamp and I had returned to my grubby tent, starving after hours of
dancing, hunting for sundries in my mess of tech and costumery. She
asked me what I was going to do next now that the swim was done, and I,
drunkenly, through a mouthful of baked beans that I was spooning straight
from the can into my mouth, apparently said was going to walk to Iran,
singing the whole way. I say apparently, because I had no memory of
this declaration. Ellie reminded me of it when I excitedly told her earlier this
69
year about the plans for my new walking project. She looked at me in her
quizzical, generous, loving way and said, Yes, I know about that, you told
me ages ago. It seems I had told her before Id even told myself, or my
grandmother, or my aunts, or you.
More of these true story sources spring up every day that I live through the
preparations for the walk. Ah-Be, as with all my work as a live artist, is my
life unfolding, a life lived in service, a story being told using strategies I
have gathered from experiences in theatre, performance, music,
philosophy, politics, law, literature, poetry, the Internet, the land and
spiritual practice. In service of what? The answer to that question expands
and contracts around an idea I call the Oneness an idea of love, truth,
community, belonging, revelation, creation. I envisage that Ah-Be will tell
stories of the Oneness, via the medium of live art, through the channel of
my life, for the goodness of you all.
AC: With Ah-Be you are going to cross several national borders in an
attempt to go back to Iran, in a journey that you define as a hopeful
alternative narrative to the stereotypical portrayal of the migrants
tale and today we could add also to the stereotypical portrayal of the
so called refugees crisis. How do you think your message of true
love that you are bringing back to your grand-mother and also
inviting people to join your journey, can revert that narrative?
SZ: Your question guides me implicitly to answer thus: we see the flight
from the East to West as a flight of fear, of escape from bad to good;
therefore the return from West to the East can only be a return of love, with
love, for love. An invitation to participate in the love that flows against the
fire of fear is powerful because it offers to soothe those burning pains;
even animals heartless enough to lack sympathy for refugees feel the
burning pain of fear, so the journeys enactment and attendant invitation to
participate soothes all. However, your question also implies, what else
but love would propel the agency of one fortunate enough to live in the
West to will a return to that darkening Eastern horizon? I asked myself
that question as well. By positioning love and one true love, at that! as
the hook for every other sociopolitical context, by placing my romantic life
at the centre of my practice as if it were a sculptural object to be moulded,
Im making overt a consistent, though often hidden, theme in my artworks
and harnessing the power of a tale as old as time. Girls seeks boy for
eternal devotion, please apply within. But there is something about that
implication not yours specifically, but the one that I infer from the wider
discursive context which grates on me. The implied heroism of my
journey reinforces the supremacy of the West over the East, a cultivated
supremacy which was unleashed by European colonial impulses, and
which arguably got us all into this mess.
70
Walking of my own free will, as a women, West to East, privileged with
multiple citizenship, alone except for the companions that choose to join
me, fearless, bearing only love and the hope of love, and placing my
actions on a universally accessible stage for all to witness, I manifestly
oppose the motifs of the refugee crisis, of the masses of men and families
walking with fear through the shadowy valleys of crisis. In every migrants
heart is a question of when they can return home. In spirit, I am their
daughter, their granddaughter, answering that question. I relieve them of
the indignity caused by the oppressor who insists on supremacy over
them; yes, fathers, yes mothers, I am going home, fuck all these
supremacists, I am going back to our own land.
Though, of course, its infinitely more complicated than that. See the
Oneness for details.
SZ: Sound, song, music and musicality are the invisible infrastructure of
my life, and therefore my work, always evolving and growing, cradling me,
transposing my affections and curtailments onto my voice and rhythm,
signposting, commemorating and monumentalising, sometimes creating
communities around me, sometimes crowds before me, sometimes my
only friend. Except for when I am writing, I rarely pass a waking hour
without music, I hear sound in my dreams. If you squint with your third
eye, you can feel that everything is a song being sung. There are a
thousand ways that the project will sing, through Spotify playlists, through
the choir that will sing at the opening ceremony on the first dawn of the
walk, through my own practice of singing the Islamic call-to-prayer every
day, through the anthem that I will write while walking, through the
performances I give along the way, through the people that join me and
teach me their songs, through the sounds of the rivers, the birds, the trees,
the humans, all singing their own lives away.
Intimacy and exposure are facets of privacy and publicity that feel
emotionally relevant to me as an individual at the beginning of the 21st
century, though only because of the stories about private and public life
that weve been told. These stories are told across the battle for the
collapsing frontier of privacy in digital space. They are told by the
prejudice meted out to those whose lives manifest the changing norms of
human sexual practices. They are told by the shame used to disempower
agency of all magnitudes. They are told by the exploitation of living beings
that is fuelled by the entrenched Enlightenment scientistic fiction of the
71
unitary human consciousness that lives inside the biological human brain.
Being only human, we internalise these stories so that we can live our
lives. Perhaps because I have lived between stories between England,
Iran, Catholicism, Islam, Europe, America Ive noticed that these stories
were once told with different characters and plot lines. For example, just a
few years ago, I might have taken it for granted that an omniscient divine
presence witnessed all my deeds, that I shared my consciousness with
every rank of being from star to starfish, that my flowing sexual energy
would flourish shamelessly through communal ritual, that alter fires must
burn to mark the passage of each bloody sacrifice. All sorts of stories.
AC: Ah-Be (in the direction of a rose) Blue (dar maseereh yek goleh
roz) is an ambitious and intriguing project whose realisation seems to
have been involving many people among team and supporters. Would
you mind telling us a bit more about them and their role in the
creation of the piece?
SZ: Oh, there are so many people helping! An ever-growing list of humans,
agencies, organisations, institutions of course there are. I am dedicating
a significant chunk of my life to crossing a continent and a half on foot
while doing a live broadcast that has no technological precedent. How
could it be any other way? Perhaps, if it were a solo pilgrimage in an old
spiritual paradigm without the audio aspect, if I were a sadhu or a
wandering druid, then maybe I could be working alone, although even then
Id be collaborating with the divine Presence, Awen, the Oneness or
72
whoever you want to credit for everything that moves beyond my will. The
project actually began forming when the first funding support was offered
by someone who is heavily invested in the story of the Iran, so its never
really been just me. The project team has several producers, specialists,
support organisations, patrons, sponsors and mentors. At the moment, I
am Executive Producer and Lead Artist, so I hold the reigns and make all
the big decisions. Im looking forward to handing the Exec Producer reigns
over to a bigger organisation soon, so that I can focus on harnessing my
soul for the fun stuff, though at this stage there is no distinction between
producing the project and creating the artwork, each decision is a creative
decision. Over a decade of working in creative teams first in theatre, then
in the music industry, then in a band, then as an emerging performance
artist in collectives, and now as a somewhat emerged and working full-
time solo artist Ive learned that the best way to make good decisions is
to listen to the people who know what they are doing, and that eventually
someone has to have the final say.
Thats my method, it works for me. All my freelancers get a huge amount
of creative scope, I work with them because I like their style, ideas and
attitude rather than because they can do my bidding. Managing a team is
one of my favourite parts of any project. My fathers family were all military
and my mothers family are enormous; somewhere between those
heritages, I feel very comfortable marshalling a familial battalion of creative
warriors, occasionally summoning in elders when I dont know what Im
doing, or need a resource injection. After the walk, Id like to have a
standing team around my practice that has a more radical approach to
hierarchy and workflow. Sara Zaltash Cooperative Productions now
thats ambitious.
SZ: This is the moment that I admit: I know very little about the canon of
walking art. One of the projects producers has lent me a book about
Hamish Fulton; I recently participated in a workshop at the University of
Sussex led by Karen Christopher, Augusto Corrieri and Sara Jane Bailes
Heddon and Turner (2012) Walking Women: Shifting the Tales and Scales of Mobility
69
Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol. 22(2), 2012, p. 225. More info on Walking Women at
http://www.thisisliveart.co.uk/whats-on/walking-women/
73
about performance composition in relation to landscape; I have joined the
Walking Artists Network. I have lived on permaculture projects and with
radical land activists, and presently reside in rural Gloucestershire. I tend
to cycle to get around the place, although I do go for more walks these
days. Thats about it. Initially, I was keen to preserve my naivety around
walking art, and give my audience the experience of witnessing my growth
through the discipline. By analogy, I have never trained as a dancer, and
yet when I dance with those who have trained, they envy me for my
freedom of movement. Same with music I have hardly any formal music
training, so I can hear things intuitively that technique blocks out. Having
preserved that naivety while Ah-Be was beginning, I can now hold space
for the ideas that will serve the project. As my genesis story proffers, I
didnt even really choose walking as my medium, Im just following a turn
of phrase through to practical manifestation in in service of an idea. Apart
from my ontological and epistemological allegiance to Performance in
general, I am opposed to being medium specific.
We talked about Pippa Bacca because her brutal death at the hands of
bad men kept being thrown at me as a reason why my walk was too
dangerous to enact. I was noting to you that women I was consulting with
were eager to help in whatever way they could, while men felt that they
needed to give me permission, or to protect me. The male response and
this is from even the most enlightened males was often You cant do
that, its not safe, whos coming with you?, whereas women would say,
thats impressive, how can I help? what do you need? Men know men, I
guess, and patriarchy runs deep. Pippas story inspired me to embed
security into the creative strategies of the walk, to trust in the reality of the
world, rather than my ideals for it. Instead of leaning on patriarchy and
capitalism by hiring an ex-SAS man and loading my gear onto a support
vehicle, Ive begun calling out to organisations along the route that support
people who a vulnerable to dangerous prejudice artists, women, men,
trans, queer, all the colours, all the abilities, all the creatures to join me
walking through dangerous zones, so that our collectivity keeps us safe.
There is also the universal call-out for people to join me walking, so even if
you feel invulnerable in the face of prejudice, and just fancy walking with
me, you can, and youll be helping me be safe. Unless youre a bad man,
or a bad woman, or a bad creature. In which case, stay away. Or tune in
via the live stream!
AC: In our conversation you mentioned that all this year has been
completely dedicated to building Ah-Be (in the direction of a rose)
Blue (dar maseereh yek goleh roz) and you have already organised a
launch party, workshops and events in Bristol in July. What was the
response of your audience and what are your plans for the rest of
2016?
Additional resources
76
LADA STUDY ROOM RESOURCES SUMMARIES
77
Pbl Study Room Guide: On Amy Sharrocks P2249
Falling, 2013
78
Pbl Brutal Silences: A Live Art Ann Maria Healy, P1661
Development Agency Study Helena Walsh
Room Guide on Live Art in
Ireland, 2011
79
Pbl (W)reading Performance Rachel Lois Clapham P1433
Writing: A Study Room Guide
(2010) by Rachel Lois
Clapham, 2010
80
Pbl Francis Alys, 2007 Francis Alys P0911
81
Pbl Codex Espangliensis: From Guillermo Gmez- P0283
Columbus to the Border Pea, Enrique
Patrol, 2000 Chagoya, Felicia Rice
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DVD Between the Borders, 2014 Between the Borders P2728
& Pbl
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DVD Borderstasis - a Video Diary, Guillermo Gmez- D0760
1998 Pea
84
#europe | A selected list of Study Room resources on Live Art and
Europe
Pbl = Publication; Art= Article; DF= Digital File; DlC=Digital link/Conference; DfC=Digital
file/Catalogue; DlA= Digital link/Article-interview
85
Pbl Contemporary Theatres in Joe Kelleher and P0805
Europe, 2006 Nicholas Ridout
86
Pbl Freedom through work in Dan Urian A0213
the Deathland of Europe,
1993
87
88
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank LADA for giving me the opportunity to look into their
resources to carry on my ongoing journey through borders and their
relation to Live Art.
I am grateful to all the interviewees present (and future) who took the time
to reflect on and answer my questions: Lois Keidan, Tania El Khoury, Nria
Gell, Helena Walsh, Almir Koldzic, Natasha Davis, Marilena Zaroulia,
Sarah Zaltash.
Many thanks to the patient editors, translators, and mentors for their
needed help, wonderful conversations and meaningful suggestions: Dr.
Chris Kul-Want, Dr. Karl Baker, Dr. Licia Cianetti, Dr. Simone Ciufolini,
Brian Stone, Dr. Iberia Perez, Rosa Perez Monclous, Michele DAgnano.
Finally, a big thank you to everybody who has been contacting me to point
out publications, projects, events and relevant artists.
The Author
Alessandra Cianetti is a Live Art curator, producer and writer. She is co-
director of the London-based art organisation Something Human. Among
the organisations activities, since 2013 she has been conceiving,
producing and coordinating live and visual art projects across Europe and
Southeast Asia in partnership with institutions such as the Barbican
Centre, Deptford Lounge, City of Skopje, and with the support, among
others, of the Arts Council England and the European Cultural Foundation.
She has worked with international arts and cultural organisations and
institutions on numerous contemporary arts and culture events. These
include artists development projects and performances with New Work
Network and socially engaged art projects with the drawing shed in
London; cultural policies conferences with the Italian Ministry of Culture
and Tor Vergata University in Rome (Italy); exhibitions, festivals and
publishing projects with Fefe Project and Les Flaneurs in Rome; and
photography exhibitions with Ikona Gallery in Venice (Italy). Alessandra
recently graduated at the MRes Art: Theory and Philosophy at the Central
Saint Martins, UAL, London.
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Performing Borders - Appendix
A Study Room Guide
90
Performing Borders Appendix - A Study Room Guide appendix by
Alessandra Cianetti
Performing Borders Study Room Guide and its appendix explore the ways
Live Art practices have been responding to the notion of borders, both
physical and conceptual. As a border practice that crosses and pushes
boundaries, Live Art has been one of the most responsive ways in which
artists have been addressing the shifting notion of borders and connected
societal issues. From this perspective, the ephemerality, flexibility and
resilience of Live Art become a privileged way to investigate urgent current
political changes and struggles within and across borders. This Guide
explores the notion of border in relation to Live Art and the works of
experimental artists that have been addressing issues around physical
borders, with a special focus on the current European situation and its
multiple crises.
This Appendix follows the previous Performing Borders Study Room Guide
published in October 2016 and includes the latest interviews of the blog
performingborders. Live Art | crossings | europe with Live Artists,
academics and arts professionals Kay Syng Tan (October 2016), Federica
Mazzara (November 2016), Lisa Alexander (December 2016), Michaela
Crimmin (January 2017) and Lucia Palmero (February 2017).
performingborders. Live Art | crossings | europe is an exploration of Live
Artists who are responding to the challenging notion of contemporary
borders and the shifting concept of Europe. The first phase of this
research project run from February 2016 to February 2017, each month
the blog published an interview with an artist, academic or art
professional, as a way to open up the debate on what the contemporary
meaning of border in Live Art is and how artists are addressing this issue
within Europe.
All the interviewees: Lois Keidan (February 2016) | Tania El Khoury (March
2016) | Nria Gell (April 2016) | Helena Walsh (May 2016) | Almir Koldzic
(June 2016) | Natasha Davis (July 2016) | Marilena Zaroulia (August 2016) |
Sara Zaltash (September 2016) | Kai Syng Tan (October 2016) | Federica
Mazzara (November 2016) | Lisa Alexander (December 2016) | Michaela
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Crimmin (January 2017) | Lucia Palmero (February 2016).
Kai Syng Tan: Yes, I set up RUN! RUN! RUN! to, well, run solo and
collaborative work and the activities will jolt you from your nightmare
because what we do is not so much about running as a sport or exercise,
but how its physical and poetic processes can be mobilised as metaphor,
methodology and material to enable us to reimagine ourselves and the
world around us.
For instance, in the workshop at Documenta, participants ran for all of two
minutes, to think and talk about how running affects what and how they
think and talk. The commission in Finland was a series of running
masterclasses conducted by world-class running experts ages seven to
14 to teach adults (top age: 84) how to re-cultivate fun and silliness, to
give them the permission to trip over, to throw tantrums and to giggle.
I picked up running in 2009 because it can be fun and silly (in theory at
least, although it is not always the case in real life for a middle-aged
beginner). After all, as toddlers, soon as we could walk, we ran until our
parents and teachers reprimanded us. The same way an artist may use
bronze, acrylic or data, I mobilise running. Running, and previously,
swimming, hula hopping and so on, because it is of and by the body.
93
Running, because it is about putting one foot after the other, without the
need for equipment or even shoes. Running, because intellectuals have
insisted on mocking it as a futile (Baudrillard) New Age myth (Zizek), and
preferred walking as the sensitive, spiritual act that has built Western
civilisation (French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut) ignoring the fact that
artists do use running (in a sensitive and spiritual way), such as artist Jun
Nguyen-Hatsushiba and his Breathing is Free: 12,756.3, an ongoing
performance since 2007, in an attempt to physically experience world
refugee crisis by running the diameter of the earth, 12,756.3km. Running
instead of flying, like Icarus because it is mundane and everyday. You
do not have to go for a run, you can run after a bus (or not). And way
before it became popular for people to go for a run (and there are many
more than 2 million people a week in England who do so today), our
ancestors had had to run when hunting for food, two million years ago. So
biologically and neurologically, human beings are tailor made to run. Aside
from our enormous buttocks (maximus gluteus) and that have no use
whatsoever for walking, human beings have cultivated cognitive skills such
as the retention and recall of the details (topography, potential food
sources, water sources, etc) of large areas of land, and a long-range
vision or ability to project and extrapolate, from having to chase for 6, 7
hours after an antelope in the African planes. Running rather than
jogging because if you cannot physically run, you can metaphorically do
so. The word run has no less than eighty-one definitions and expressions
in the Oxford English Dictionary. So its poetic potential is endless, including
expressions like letting your imagination run riot, being on the run,
running into, and running against.
The expressions running into and running against are at the heart of
productive antagonisms, a conceptual framework which collaborator
geographer Dr Alan Latham and I have come up with. At its most basic, this
refers to the facilitation of a kind of potential space, a between space where
the usual norms of disciplinary practice are temporarily suspended. At a
broader level, it is about a mode of working with and through difference.
The workshop in Finland for instance was about exploring the creative
sparks that could emerge from collisions and frictions of dissimilar people
and elements: of generation (adults, teenagers, children); of disciplinary
94
backgrounds (Alan is a geographer, I am an artist); of cultures (Finland,
Singapore where I am from originally, New Zealand where Alan
yields, and UK our adopted home). If it was competitive, it was a
competition against time to come up with a work after just 4 hours of
workshopping with the children. And with my kind of timing for the 10 races
I have competed, I think it is illegal for me to talk about competitiveness and
running in the same sentence. (For the record, it was 4 hours 24 minutes
for the 2011 London Marathon and 1 hour 53 minutes 01 seconds for the
2012 KNI Walthamstow Forest Half Marathon. Go on, mock me),
95
KST: I met various people in Munich and not all of them were keen to tell
their stories for various reasons. Some people had just arrived and were
worried about talking about what had happened to them and by that maybe
endanger family members who are still in Syria. Others were worried about
their legal status in Munich because in many situations there are details
you focus on and others you might not tell to the authorities, the narratives
you share with your friends are definitely different from the ones you tell to
the authorities of the country you would like to be hosted by; there are
various and conflicting narratives at play in these situations. In the end I
worked with three people who were willing to tell us their stories. Their
identity was hidden and it was an open process; they chose how to present
their stories. We built a relationship with the participants, as they
understood that I come first from a position of solidarity rather than from a
journalistic approach.
96
different if it was presented here in the UK and now. In the UK there is
obviously what the governments stand is with the Home Secretary Theresa
Mays speeches that show a lot of pride in closing borders, and she is even
calling for a change of the legal framework around refugee status. So my
work depends on the context, the space and whose story I am telling.
I dont think that the passage from more autobiographical works to pieces
such as Gardens Speak and Stories of Refuge is a change in my politics in
terms of being against borders and being against discrimination over
borders, but now there is more urgency in discussing this because people
are actually fleeing wars in which a lot of these big governments are
involved directly or indirectly. There is a human responsibility, a political
responsibility and an artistic responsibility to respond from the point of view
of the people telling their stories.
97
As a migrant, woman, academic, artist, teacher and someone
neurologically-wired differently (with ADHD, dyspraxia and dyslexia), I
consider borders visible, invisible (which are more insidious than those
you can see), political, disciplinary, natural, professional as artificial lines
of division to be crossed, challenged, complicated, shifted, teased, pushed.
(That said I have also precisely created multiple boxes with the declaration
and definitions at the start of this statement about who/ what I am
although those identities are not fixed but modulated, modified, further
multiplied; thus another box or label that I use to describe myself is
shapeshifter). Closed walls means closed thinking. Glass ceilings are to
be smashed, party lines by dictators to be crossed, gates to be crashed,
limits to be pushed, bars to be metaphorically raised, and, just to continue
with my rhyming roll, Mars to be reached (though not arrogantly conquered,
as Kevin Fong, an expert in space medicine, warns). If too stubbornly-
entrenched to be toppled or knocked down, the least we can do is to mock,
and knock, criticise, and create leakages, cracks and fissures on these
borders, so that things can slip through, pollute, corrupt and disturb that
which are walled in, protected or kept out. In 2004 Francis Alys walked
24km along Jerusalem, leaking 58 litres of green paint along the way. In
1964, in an act of what a writer calls subversion by an irritation, Joseph
Beuys recommended that the Berlin wall should be raised by 5cm so that
the proportions can become beautiful (Poerksen 2011). I am not much of a
fan of Suzanne Moore (or Beuys for that matter) but agree with she says
about Beuys proposal in the context of the imminent Calais wall today:
It is good to be reminded that there are those who build walls but there are
those who will build ladders over them. That is called hope. (Moore 2016)
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light-footed, and light-hearted. Writing at the age of 61, the American author
and runner Joyce Carol Oates notes that she never saw a No
Trespassing sign that wasnt a summons to my rebellious blood. Such
signs, dutifully posted on trees and fence railings, might as well cry, Come
Right In! (1999).
Front(ier) Running is just one of about eight proposals I have created in the
past three years or so on the theme of running along borders. In Front(ier)
Running, I propose to create GPS drawings and leave a digital trace (after
all, the digital refers to the digits of the foot, too) while run along borders,
such as between the two Koreas or along the Hungarian wall. As Alys says,
sometimes doing something poetic can become political and sometimes
doing something political can become poetic.
In another, a film about and shot on the run, I will run in the Right to
Movement marathon in Palestine and chat with co-runners. The annual
marathon is thus called because movement is a human right, according to
Article 13 of the UN Human Rights Charter. Runners run from the Church
of Nativity, along the Wall, through two refugee camps and turnaround point
in a checkpoint, according to the website.
99
When the building of the Calais wall was announced, I sketched another
proposal, Life On The Run / Running Into Difference, to run with Calais
residents those who are native as well as recent along it. This run
will be more of a skip. Not with skipping rope but a jaunty, time-consuming,
frivolous, inefficient and irritating hop.
AC: This year you have been touring your project HAND-IN-HAND in
both Grenoble Festival, France and the Whitworth Art Gallery, UK as a
post-Brexit reflection in which, referencing thinker Matthew Taylors
call to a cycle of hope and unity within the post-referendum
discourse, you created a collective experience aimed at subverting
and sabotaging the UK Home Office rules about refugees in Calais.
Would you mind to tell us a bit more about the project and how it was
received in both cities?
100
methodology and metaphor to dtourn and sabotage something aggressive
and antagonistic, into something positive and creative, particularly against
the backdrop of what Taylor has called dark and dangerous times (Ill
return to Taylor in the next question).
I have been invited to run the work with first year undergraduates of the
Visual Communications course at Leeds College of Art in October, so I am
keen to understand how so-called millennials relate to one another in our
strange world.
101
KST: First of all, I think we would agree that at the heart of this discussion
of a collective future is the assumption or the hope that Suzanne
Moore talked about that art can be transformative. This seems to go
hand-in-hand with Matthew Taylors cry for clever, concrete, creative ways
of bringing a better more humane future into the here and now, to battle
despair and division. David Shrigleys recently unveiled fourth plinth at
Trafalgar Square an oversized thumbs-up, in bronze which the artist has
described as an incitement to optimism as well as a work about making
the world a better place which obviously is a ridiculous proposition, but I
think its a good proposition would fit that example of a (literally)
concrete counterpoint to insularity and pessimism.
An example of a Live Art intervention that draws out this spirit of gentle
anarchism and works as a quiet yet powerful comeback to the dark and
dangerous times would be Glasgow-based artist Rosana Cades
Walking:Holding, which I have happily learnt about after performing Hand-
in-Hand. In a work first created five years ago, Cade goes for a walk with
an audience member through their town or city, and invites them to hold
hands with six different individuals along the way. The hand-holders are
local participants who range in age, gender, race, sexuality and
background. The idea is to give people an opportunity to experience their
hometown from someone elses perspective; and to see what can happen
when you share an intimate act with a complete stranger (Cade 2016).
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The striking images documenting the performance published on Cades
website are potent proofs of the poetry and clarity of the piece. I think
Cades work draws out Claire Bishops 2004 well known and indeed well-
critiqued notion of relational antagonism, which conceptualises the setting
up of relationships that emphasize the role of dialogue and negotiation,
and which are marked by sensations of unease and discomfort rather than
belonging and sustains a tension among viewers, participants, and
context, rather than a contrived conviviality or imposed consensus of
authoritarian order. A participant of Cades work notes that he felt
completely outside my comfort zone walking with a tall young man, in
spite, or because, of the fact that its 2016 and this is my town, Reading,
which he has lived in for 30 years. He was also struck by his experience of
the work with a young woman in an electric wheelchair who said that she
rarely held anyones hand in when walking out and about, mostly because
of the physical/logistical difficulty the wheelchair created. He ends by
saying that Id really recommend people give it a go. It only lasted 30
minutes, and if you dont like it you can just walk away. Cades work
precisely shows how such a collective future is necessarily a messy,
difficult and lively cacophony. In other words, what you have described as
an intimacy and safe and trusted space should not be a neat, rose-tinted
master narrative with a happily-ever-after we-are-the-world flatness based
on lowest common denominators. Instead it includes and indeed cultivates
conflict, clashes, collisions.
KST: As we move about in the world, we sometimes run into people, ideas,
and stuffs that hit us in the face and WHAM! stops us in our tracks, in a
powerful way and then we fly with it. You are right in saying that ma has
103
influenced my work and I think it is clear that productive antagonisms bears
its spirit. I encountered ma, a notion about in betweenness, and
specifically the tension (and not a flattening or harmonisation) in between
elements, when I was living in Japan. The word spirit is appropriate here:
whether moments of silence in a kabuki play, or the gaps between the
rocks in a rock garden, ma visualises and conceptualises a potentiality
where the spirit (kami) moves through (Isozaki & Oshima 2009). It is a
powerful and poetic spatio-temporal principle underlying all traditional
Japanese art forms, and which I have written about elsewhere (see here
and here, for instance).
104
between victim/victor, truth/fiction may become blurred.
AC: Finally, let us know a bit more about your coming projects.
105
Sands (24 November, Cardiff). The Biennale draws on the RUN! RUN!
RUN! International Festival of Running 2014, which took place at the Slade
Research Centre, which the Guardian applauded for its positive
atmosphere. Come join us , if not physically, virtually by following the
#r3fest tag on Twitter.
Kai Syng Tan is an artist, visual director, sightseer and shape-shifter. Her
works have toured 450 shows including dOCUMENTA, 8th ASEAN Para
Games Ceremonies,Biennale of Sydney and transmediale at locations such
as MOMA, ZKM, ICA andDom Muzyki. Upon completing her PhD at the
Slade School of Fine Art, she founded the RUN! RUN! RUN! International
Body for Research to explore running as a critical and creative toolkit to
engage with the self, others, the city, technology and non-logocentric
modes of thinking. She has won the San Francisco International Film
Festival Golden Gate Award and Japan Foundation artist-in-residency
Award, while her works are collected by the Museum of London, Wellcome
Images and Fukuoka Art Museum. Now a Research Fellow at Leeds
College of Art, Kai is also Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts and a
Peer Reviewer of the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
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To know more about Kay Syng Tans practice:
Pbl = Publication; Art= Article; DF= Digital File; DlW=Digital link/Website; DlC=Digital
link/Conference; DfC=Digital file/Catalogue; DlA= Digital link/Article-interview
Additional resources
107
108
FEDERICA MAZZARA | NOVEMBER 2016
Federica Mazzara: The two things are not separated, rather the contrary. I
created the blog Moving Borders. The Aesthetics of Migration (that I have
recently renamed Moving Borders. Migration and The Aesthetics of
Subversion) during my time as a post-doctoral fellow at UCL (2007-2009),
as a way to keep track of the numerous initiatives, including my own,
revolving around migration and cultural expression, happening almost on a
daily basis in the UK and in other geographical spaces. I realized this was a
vibrant field and I needed a way to record and share scattered thoughts
about the importance of artistic forms in relation to the pressing
phenomenon of migration. What I started gathering is that there was an
alternative way to look at what is commonly framed as a crisis and
especially as a political and economical matter. Back then, I noticed
migration was actually becoming a source of inspiration for amazing
thinkers, artists and activists who were in search of alternative discourses,
narratives and representations around this controversial issue. This is how I
encountered the concept of migratory aesthetics by Mieke Bal, a visual
cultural scholar I had admired for years. Bal recognizes that aesthetics is a
realm where action is possible and can have effects, and this is especially
true in migratory contexts, where aesthetics has the power to promote a
process of subjectification of the migrants (and refugees) experience, who
should not be nameless, faceless bodies to be observed, but subjects with
voices, faces and stories to be told. The idea here is that art has a potential
that mainstream discourses do not have, which is to open up the possible
visibility of situations, issues, events and people and to leave it to its
109
viewers or readers to enact that visibility; to answer that call by seeing70. In
2008, I hosted Mieke Bals installation Nothing is Missing at UCL, that
translates this abstract concept into art practice. That was a great
experience for me as a scholar interested in how to frame differently and
dismantle the current (un-)representation of the migrants experience. My
idea of aesthetics of subversion is directly connected to this early stage of
my research. I am now using this expression to name a series of
increasingly more challenging acts of subversion that blend art, activism
and politics. In particular, I apply this concept to the controversial space of
Lampedusa.
AC: During the Summer you have been curating a special issue of
Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture on the Lampedusa
Island (by the way thanks for inviting me to review Ila Sherens
Portable Borders!): Lampedusa: Cultural and Artistic Spaces for
Migrant Voices. How have you made the migrants voices louder and
heard in this issue?
All the contributions to this issue embrace a view that considers migrants
70
Mieke Bal, Miguel Hernndez-Navarro (eds.), Art and Visibility in Migratory
Culture Conflict, Resistance and Agency, (Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2011),
p. 9.
110
as individuals with autonomy, subjects of power that are able to challenge
the biased representation of them as criminals or victims, depending on the
framework applied, respectively the securitarian or humanitarian one. The
contributors to this issue include activist and filmmaker Ilaria Vecchi, who is
part of a local Lampedusa collective called Askavusa; Valentina Zagaria,
anthropologist and theatre director, author of Miraculi, a play about
Lampedusa based on collective ethnographic research on the island;
Alessandro Triulzi, Gianluca Gatta, Dagmawi Yimer, Zakaria Mohamed Ali
and Mahamed Aman, all members with different roles of the Archivio
Memorie Migranti (Archive of Migrant Memories) based in Rome, the most
important hub in Italy that promote migrants: their self-narration and
representation; Gabriella Ghermandi, a writer and performer whose art is
an expression of the strive to cope with the arduousness of migrating and
adapting in a cultural space that does not respect your identity and values
and Maya Ramsay, a London-based artist with a sophisticated view on the
issues of migration, death and invisibility.
AC: Lately you have been quite vocal against both the label crisis
and of a specific view of refugees seen as faceless mass that has
been propagated both by media and the cultural sector. Here Im
thinking as an example of your review of the multi-awarded
documentary Fuocoammare by Gianfranco Rosi. Would you mind to
tell us a bit more about this view and what you think art should do to
create a counter narrative?
FM: Along with several other scholars, who have voiced their resistance
towards the label crisis to define the current global migratory passage (I
am here thinking, among others, of Nicholas De Genova, Martina Tazzioli,
Maurice Stierl, Charles Heller etc. Read their collective analysis of the
problematic word Crisis and its critical implications here), I strongly dislike
this expression. We are not facing a migrant crisis, rather the crisis of the
EU management of the peoples right to move and escape. I believe we
need to contrast and oppose this misrepresentation of the issue of moving
across borders, and I believe that art has the potential to subvert this way
of thinking by exposing the viewers to commonly hidden perspectives, by
allowing them to see through different lenses. This is why I do not like
111
Rosis interpretation of the Lampedusa crisis. Despite all the international
praise received, Rosis documentary (?) limits itself to dragging the viewer
into feelings of compassion and pity through a spectacle of suffering that
locates the migrants and to some extend also the locals in spaces of
invisibility they commonly inhabit in all mainstream representations, failing
to encourage a more sophisticated understanding of the issue of
immigration into Lampedusa and Europe. Migrants do not take the word in
the film, apart from a few minutes when they describe how they are
distributed in the boat or when they sing a song expressing their
desperation, otherwise they appear exclusively in all their misery: crying,
dirty, exhausted people freshly rescued by the heroes of the Italian Navy,
or even worse they appear as corpses, while the documentary fails to
address the reasons behind their death.
As I stated in the review of the film I wrote for my blog, I think Rosi, as an
intellectual who decides to engage with a pressing issue such as
Lampedusa and migration, cannot limit himself to producing a poetic and
sentimental film that asks the viewer to stay human. This is NOT what we
need, not anymore! We have had enough of sentimentalism and the
humanitarian approach is not helping us understanding the real implications
of this cruel and complicated story where we are all involved. We need to
dismantle the paradox of a militarised/humanitarian travesty that has
chosen Lampedusa as its ideal stage of a made up crisis. Why are these
people escaping? Why are we not making their passage safe, while at the
same time spending millions in order to rescue them from the perils of this
very passage? Why not showing Lampedusa for what it is: the centre of a
border spectacle about which the inhabitants are very aware; people who
are resisting the travesty, who are concerned and reject the growing
militarisation of their land, people who are tired of the politicians and
celebrities parading on the island, inhabitants who do not want a Nobel
prize for peace. Lampedusans want instead the EU to come to terms with
its responsibility about a crisis that it has fabricated and to let the island
deal with its old problems: lack of a proper hospital and playgrounds, run-
down schools, disappearance of fishing etc. But all this has no voice in
Rosis documentary (http://movingborders.blogspot.co.uk/).
112
Rosis FILM (better calling it for what it is) scares me, or better what scares
me is the unanimous praise for his film. It is a symptom of the fact that we
are stuck in a close-minded and biased view, where migrants, in the best
scenario, can only occupy the stage as victims to be rescued, while we, the
rescuers, can be reassured that our humanitarian ethos is preserved.
71
F. Mazzara, Objects, debris and memory of the Mediterranean passage: Porto M
in Lampedusa, in G. Proglio and L. Odasso (eds), Crossing Border Lampedusa.
Subjectivity, visibility and memory in stories of sea and land, Palgrave 2017.
72
Iain Chambers, The Museum of Migrating Modernities, in Cultural Memories,
Migrating Modernities and Museum Practoces, ed. Beatrice Ferrara (Milan:
Politecnico di Milano, 2012), 23.
113
place that participates in and shares the marginality and displacement
experienced by the migrants and refugees. The energy released by the
objects is, according to the collective, impossible to define and fix and
therefore it must interrupt any logic of archiving. The objects talk back to
different viewers in different ways. Porto M has the potential to subvert
traditional ways of preserving memory around migration by prioritizing the
performative dimension of the memorial event, to use Curtis words,
although issues of preservation still need to be addressed by the collective.
114
constantly and migrants and refugees show on a daily basis that the
manufacturing of virtual obstacles has lots of flaws: no matter how many
new borders the anti-migration advocates build, people will still move, cross
and dismantle them. This is also how borders become places of resistance,
places where to perform their struggle, their agency and power to subvert
any possible attempt to irregularize their passages.
115
undesired others and their attempt to come to terms with a place for which
they have mixed feelings, a place that saved their lives, but also took away
their dignity as individuals with stories, dreams and hopes, although there
have been various initiatives within the island to favour a different visibility
of migrants subjectivities.
Its in this way, I think, that art can help us dissolving the most important
bordersthe mental ones.
AC: Finally, tell us more about the direction of your research in the
future and where we can meet you to know more about it.
73
Jacques Rancire, Aesthetics and its Discontent (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009),
pp. 24-25.
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writing a book for Peter Lang on Lampedusa and the aesthetics of
subversion. She has previously published on the literature of migration and
on the relationship between literature and painting. Her recent publication
include: Spaces of Visibility for the Migrants of Lampedusa, in L. Baracco
(ed.), Re-imagining Europes Borderlands: The Social and Cultural Impact
of Undocumented Migrants on Lampedusa. Italian Studies. 70: 4 (2015)
449-464; Performing a Postmigration Cinema in Italy. Corazones de Mujer
by K. Kosoof. Modern Italy, 18.1 (Jan. 2013), 41-53; Subverting the
Narratives of the Lampedusa Borderscape. Special issue. Crossings.
Journal of Migration and Culture 7:2 (2016 forthcoming). This is a Special
issue edited by Federica.
Additional resources
117
LISA ALEXANDER | DECEMBER 2016
There you presented a project that dealt with what seemed at the time
a possibility to break with the austerity measures that were strangling
a country and gave hope to the left in Europe: the Greek Referendum
of 2015. Although the aftermath has been different than expected, you
made sure that international artists would respond to this European
historical moment with the project Love Letters to a (Post-Europe)
on 2nd and 3rd October 2015. Can you tell us a bit more about the
structure of the project, the artists who participated and the
generosity it involved?
I had recently lived in Athens and witnessed the sense of betrayal and
uncertainty that followed the overwhelming oxi to the stringent austerity
measures for bailout set out by the Troika the subject of Greeces
referendum last year. In spite of the no-vote no clear outcome followed and
the goal posts were moved again regarding bailout measures. The idea for
the event stemmed from an urge to curate a process of coming together
and collective witness in the context of Europe at that moment and
particularly with reference to Greece. It enabled a platform for excessive
118
responses to the so-called crisis, at a time when the Troika was making
excessive use of economic dogma as a means to manipulate regime
change. I sent out the provocation in late July a couple of weeks after the
referendum.
All artists including myself gave their work and time to it. Box office
proceeds were divided between the Athens-based charity Solidarity for All
and the venue. Athens-based artists hosted visiting artists, who traveled of
their own volition. This was integral to the whole ethos and artistic frame of
the event to do something not dictated to by economic agendas and as
an act of generosity. It was a gesture. The action of coming together, of
gifting a short work, of performing in person in Athens or nominating
another to perform a text, an action or sending a video missive. A letter
addresses another directly, a love letter invites intimacy, dispenses with
formality, exceeds boundaries, engages a sensual encounter of the
moment, is plural. A frame of witness that approaches another in the
moment.
74
Berardi, F. B. (2012). The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance. Los Angeles,
Semiotext(e).
119
AC: On Saturday 18th June the European Theatre Research Network,
the Inside/Outside Europe Research Network, the Birkbeck Centre for
Contemporary Theatre and the Camden Peoples Theatre presented
Being European: Before the Referendum. They meant the Brexit
referendum, which asked British citizens whether they wanted for the
UK to stay in the EU and that would happen 5 days later. At the time
we were discussing possible scenarios, now we know the answer!
You have subsequently been invited to perform at the event After the
Referendum that took place on 17th September at the Camden
Peoples Theatre. How did it feel as a UK artist that has been worked
and lived in Greece for a long time to respond artistically to this
international but deeply personal shock? With the piece you
proposed in collaboration with Hari Marini, If/Then, you explore the
terrain of the dilemma drawing on on-street vocal recordings of the
general public in Athens, Glasgow and London. What kind of
response to Brexit emerged from this relation between cities,
voices, and texts?
Your wide face offers warmth. Your smile is laughter. Your laughter
becomes mine (Lara Pawson)
Before the vote occurred Hari and I agreed that we wanted to open up a
space for multiple voices and one of sharing amidst all the negativity.
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If/Then also looked for inspiration and another way to express being
through shared, appositional and dissonant narrativities.
We drink tea. How many is OK I ask you. Which ones are OK. Are the
ones in your street OK. Are the ones among my friends OK. Your hands
are in your pocketsWe have to be able to talk about it you say. We have
to talk about health tourismYour honesty is made of lead. My rage is
patient (Lara Pawson)
I flew to Athens on the night of the 23rd June having submitted a postal
vote. The lack of debate prior to framing a question of this magnitude in
such general terms did not quell my shock of waking up to the result. A few
days before Id heard that my closest friend in Greece had a life-threatening
illness. Everything fell into sharp relief. Greece feels like another home.
There are people there I care very much about. Deep ties and involvement
spanning the last seven years. Living there twice during this period also
instilled in me a materially different sense of the social and the temporal
and each time I returned to the UK I was shocked by the onward march of
neoliberal agendas and their effects on social and civic engagement;
explicit too on a local scale in my neighbourhood in London.
Hari and I had met at Love Letters to a (Post-)Europe the year before.
Since then we had re-connected in London and exchanged ideas on living
and making. There were many voices that made up the text we performed.
In addition to the on-street encounters we invited writers and artists to
respond with short texts that explored dilemma. Hari and I wrote our own
responses within that frame as two artists who have lived in each others
countries; the UK and Greece.
Rushing in the heavy grey rain to catch my flightThe News. And then an
explosion of emotions, of thoughts blended with tiredness. A few days after
the storma British colleague asked me: Do you feel unwelcome? I said:
Sharing. I am still sharing things with people here. (Hari Marini)
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After a long discussion accompanied by ouzo and meze, I proposed to do a
banner that reads British Refugees Welcome. I write in the darkness of the
night and all around me I see people performing an exodus without a
promised land. (Myrto Tsilimpounidi)
The on-street texts were generated by a short poetic game that sought to
frame a simple, collective witnessing of moments occurring in different
locales and social spaces. We did this on streets, squares and in other
public spaces in Athens75 and London. I also facilitated some encounters in
Glasgow and Edinburgh.
Then stories are truth/ If the birds were stars/ If this was all gone in 20
years (participants, Athens)
But what if I could come inside as a stranger? What if I could come as I am,
before any possible understanding of what that might mean? What if you
could come as you are? What new forms of communion could that bring
about? (Joo Florencio)
75
In Athens these encounters were part of another work Multilogue excerpts of
which were broadcast on Beton7 radio; part of Performance Biennale: No Future
and Beton7s V_Ideas, Performances 2016.
122
What kind of space can I open up for her here? But were not quite there
yet and I hope we dont arrive. How vital is this in between space. (Lisa)
AC: In responding to the two referenda in Greece and the UK, you
have been asking for collective responses in a way that seems aimed
at building a common space for discussion and sharing. In our
conversation you referred to what Claire Bishop named delegated
performance while in the text of If/Then the word change is often
repeated. Is art a means for proposing new social paradigms?
76
Bishop, C. (2012). Delegated Performance: Outsourcing Authenticity.
Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London, Verso:
219-240.
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example Athens, they also cite art as
a perfect place for imagining the socialevery single work or project has a
potential to project one possible world. We need not expect these worlds to
be large, completethey probably cannot change societybut they can
still hack the virtual world of our society rather than leaving it alone in its
actuality.77
AC: A lot is going on at the moment for you, many projects are
developing from the previous ones and many new ones are taking
shape. Can you give us a hint of what comes next for Lisa Alexander?
77
Cveji, B. and Vujanovi, A. (2016) The Crisis of the Social Imaginary and
Beyond. (paper): https://www.academia.edu/26017681/ p.5
124
Lastly I am looking into setting up a relay network and event series that
explores ways of linking social and cultural contexts in Europe (and
beyond) translocally through engaging concepts and practices of gifting,
different cultural understandings of hosting and hospitality, and notions of
passage with reference to freedom, agency and safety.
Additional resources
125
MICHAELA CRIMMIN | JANUARY 2017
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lodestar for events that followed where the debate has centred on countries
including Palestine, Northern Ireland and Iraq, countries where the UK has
been directly involved in the drawing of borders and the conflicts that have
and are taking place.
There are obvious reasons to question this strategy, including working with
artists from a range of different heritages with different methodologies and
interests. For the time being we are nevertheless comfortable with the fact
that experiences, questions, and challenges that occur under the broad
heading of conflict provide an easily shared basis for sustained and we
hope incremental exchange and debate.
In the second part of your question you ask whether I see a change in the
notion of border. To begin with borders are a shared reality. The writer
Frances Stonor Saunders wrote a fascinating article for the London Review
of Books in March of last year78 (the prompt for us to invite her to speak at
our recent series of Promised Land events). In this she references Gnter
Grasss Oskar from the The Tin Drum and writes there is only one way into
this life, and one way out of it. Everything that happens in between all the
thresholds we cross and recross, all the decisions and revisions that a
minute will reverse is bordered by this unbiddable truth. What we hope
for is safe passage between these two fixed boundaries, to be able to make
something of the experience of being alive before we are required to stop
being alive. Theres no negotiating birth or death. What we have is the
journey. It goes without saying that some peoples journeys, involving
crossing many borders of various kinds, are a hell of a lot easier than
others. However now in the UK we are being jolted into a prospect of not
being able to travel quite so freely across certain countries borders that we
have probably taken for granted all our lives. Having been fed the heady
concept of globalisation given the money, the right passport and
ownership of the right technology and having been accustomed to an
unprecedented ease of communication, we in the West are perhaps waking
up. There is a shuddering realisation that cyber walls are more porous than
we had presumed; that drones might rather easily dodge a scrambled
78
Frances Stonor Saunders, Where on Earth are you?, London Review of Books,
Vol. 38 No. 5, 03.013.2016, pp 7-12.
127
military aircraft; to say nothing of the nuclear threat that we have somehow
buried at the back of our minds since the end of the Cold War. We know
from Chernobyl that nuclear fallout is impossible to contain within a
particular region. Horrifying also are the binaries between belief systems
and cultures that have resurfaced over recent years, creating divisions that
can seem as impenetrable as the border controls, wire, bricks and cement
between countries.
AC: In the last two months you have been co-curating with the
Goethe-Institut London Promised Land: two events addressing the
notions of Europe and the clash between its vision as a project of
freedom and the reality of Fortress Europe. You have been inviting
amazing speakers between academia and the art world and I would
like to ask you two questions, one for each of the two events.
* AC: During the first event Promised Land: panel discussion last
October you invited artists Hrair Sarkissian and Jonas Staal; writer
Frances Stonor Saunders and academic Dr. Bernadette Buckley.
What do you think were the main reflections drawn at this event that
are important to share with us?
MC: Frances Stonor Saunders, following on from her article in the LRB,
began by asking why, in our much-hyped globalised world, (is) the rhetoric
of the Promised Land so mercilessly unequal to the reality? She went on to
say Im trying to comprehend the world as a question, Im not sure of any
other way. I could not conceivably do justice to her talk, nor to those of the
other speakers, but happily in this case there will be a recording on the ICA
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website later this year, and a fuller account published of Frances talk. Her
final question was perhaps the most devastating: what if heaven and hell
are not separate destinations? Being given a difficult question to ponder I
find more interesting than listening to any number of answers. One of the
joys of art is that artists and writers of merit spare us all a reductive
solution, or dogma of any sort, and instead present new perspectives for an
engaged audience to consider.
At the event at the ICA, Jonas Staal introduced his fearless programme of
work where he is testing the concept of union alongside an acceptance of
difference, be this in Rojava or the Netherlands. A reflection here was on
how courageous artists can be and how far from the myth of the artist in a
secluded studio. How art and politics are inseparable. Then there was Hrair
Sarkissians moving study of belonging, and of not belonging, and of
searching for identity. This was hugely moving, his images working in
parallel to his words, and a reminder that art is privileged in its freedom to
legitimately bring a personal account to address the political. Finally I am
trying to extract Bernadette Buckleys deep consideration of the relationship
between art and politics from her so we can share this more widely.
Tania Bruguera in a recent talk for BBC Radio 479 ended by saying What
can we do? How can we organise? If you remain complacent and passive,
you are part of the problem.
MC: The Goethe-Institut London invited us to consider Europe with its post-
WW2 vision of unity, security and aspiration, and in its present day reality.
The reemergence of nationalism in its most unpleasant form, division, the
displacement of people, the tightening of borders, the inequality between
the wealthy and what the press and the politicians call the rest of us, the
ordinary people. Obviously an enormous subject area and as with the ICA
event, one that was never going to make for a neat and tidy account, and
79
Tania Bruguera, Imagining the New Truth, BBC Radio 4, 05.01.2017.
129
quite possibly a miserable occasion considering the events of 2016 and the
challenges ahead. Looking at the photographs taken throughout the day by
a young artist, Nikola Zelmanovic (a number of which illustrate this piece),
confirms my memory that there was actually an extraordinary amount of
smiling and laughter. Not least in response to Nina Katchadourians Accent
Elimination, readily available on her website, and a brilliantly humorous look
at cultural stereotypes. Alongside humour, was a display of consummate
energy by each of the speakers artists and curators from Nigeria, from
Palestine, Germany, Denmark, Austria as well as the UK rammed the event
with every approach imaginable, some very directly talking about borders.
We invited a young writer currently studying at the Royal College of Art,
Alexandra Quicho, to summarise the day, as attached at the end of this
interview.
80
Ulrike Guerot and Robert Menasse, Europe and the Reconstruction of the Free
World, Green European Journal.
130
AC: As you know this blog focuses on Live Art, although with your
work we are digressing into how wider art practices are able to tackle
broader issues linked to conflicts. I wonder whether in your projects
you have been collaborating with Live Artists and in what way you
think Live Art can contribute to the aim of your work.
Finally I must say how much I admire the important work undertaken by the
Live Art Development Agency over such a sustained period, and with
consummate generosity.
AC: Unfortunately conflicts do not seem to end and the year that has
just ended has been quite challenging in that respect. Do you have
plans to address this in 2017?
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Browell and Catherine Sambrook. Palestinian artist Bisan Abu Eisheh has
just started exploring the extensive material held, and we will be in
conversation at the Mosaic Rooms on Tuesday 22 February to discuss his
observations. Jananne Al-Ani, born in Iraq, will also be hosted at Kings and
we greatly look forward to their insights from their different cultural
perspectives.
132
Square, London.
In the years immediately following World War II, political union was seen as
an antidote to the extreme nationalism that had fuelled the conflict. An
integrated Europe promised open markets, freedom of movement, and
justice upheld by the European Court. The vision is being threatened by the
rise of nationalist movements, the tightening of borders, the proliferation of
refugee camps and the displacement of people fleeing conflict, extreme
poverty and ecological disaster. Distrust and fear are mounting.
What are the ramifications for art and artists? What insights and ideas are
artists bringing? How can we move forward at a time of extreme
uncertainty?
133
its individual states. Instead, Gurot proposes that sovereignty be returned
to its citizens through the creation of a true republic: a political system
which allows for equal social, financial, and legal representation, featuring a
House of Representatives elected by individuals.
Emeka Okereke, founder of Invisible Borders and the first artist to speak,
levelled a critique against the idea of Europe as a bastion of human rights,
instead linking the migrant crisis to the imposed cartographies of
colonialism. Free movement is the key to fundamental rights, Okereke
asserted; without movement, there can be no exchange. Reflecting on
tense or serendipitous encounters from Cameroon to Bosnia-Herzegovina,
Okereke considered how to become, via your presence, an object of useful
agitation.
134
that 80-90% of those making an unauthorised border crossing into Europe
are asylum seekers with a legal right to enter, while the vast majority of
people living irregularly in the European Union entered with a regular visa
and subsequently overstayed it. Its an appealing discourse, he continued.
The obsession with an imagined invasion misrepresents what actually
happens at the border, while theres scarce interest for empirical data. The
EU only hosts 6% of the worlds refugees and the idea of Europe as a
promised land where everyone aspires to come indicates a new
Eurocentrism.
Heidenreich critiqued the connection between art and activism, seeing the
two as deeply interconnected yet ultimately unwilling to negotiate on each
others terms. Yet the three artists following demonstrated a sensitivity
often missed in political discourse about immigration and the right to live
where one wishes. Accent Elimination, a three-channel video by Nina
Kachadourian, saw the artist and her parents read through a script about
the Katchadourians origins first in their own accents, and then in each
others, working with an accent coach, With humour it showed the
differences in how speech is constructed across cultures (the individuated
words of Armenian, versus the Americans near-slurred flow), and how
simply by changing an accent stereotypes are undermined.
135
Gothenburg. Theres this thing about drawing which allows you to
physicalise empathy, she said, clicking through images she had drawn of
daily life in this highly segregated Swedish city. In doing so, she described
the many minute feelings of affinity and of isolation, referencing James
Baldwins Stranger in the Village to describe differing registers of alienation
what it means to feel welcomed, versus an outsider, and how those
distinctions are often blurred.
Additional resources
136
LUCIA PALMERO | FEBRUARY 2016
Lucia Palmero: I was born and grew up in Ventimiglia, Italy, a town on the
border with France where for years I have witnessed severe episodes of
racism towards migrants who attempt to cross the border. I have known this
border for years and it rips lives apart. For me it was fundamental to start
from here.
The performance Dont stop the Beauty was held at the station of
Ventimiglia and in particular around the waiting room, the crucial point of
the action. In this specific place, the Italian police gathers migrants arriving
by train from other Italian cities and after a brief interview with each one,
those who have not applied for asylum in Italy are deported towards
Centres for Identification and Expulsion.It is to Ventimiglia that France
sends all the migrant minors back by train, carrying out a serious violation
of the rights of these young people who, instead of being protected, are
exposed to the criminal networks of smugglers.
I asked individual singers and choirs from different origins living in this area
(coming from Camerun, Guinea Conakry, France, the Philippines and Italy)
to choose a traditional song of their own country or another song that they
would like to sing in front of the border. Each group chose one and the
outcome was a mix of traditional/popular songs and two original songs
composed just for this occasion. It became a dialogue between ancient and
contemporary voices that gave shape to a genuine moment of togetherness
despite the difficult context.
137
The idea was to show the beauty of our different heritages through a
popular and common way of expression, music, but also to highlight the
existing element of rupture, the border. This is why white singers performed
by moving in the entire space of the station while black singers performed
inside the waiting room.
The initial enjoyable moment for the public changed into something much
more intense as the presence of a filter between the black singers in the
waiting room and the audience on the platform materialized through a
closed door. Therefore I really enjoyed the attempt of a spectator to force
the door of the waiting room open and then seeing many people finally
entering the waiting room (from a secondary entrance). At the end of the
action, the public asked the singers to continue to play their songs as they
danced together.
AC: As an artist you blend practice and activism, as you also work in
a refugee camp. Lately you have been quite vocal in supporting the
French farmer and activist Cedric Herrou. How do you transpose your
activist activities into your artistic practice?
LP: At no time had I planned to merge the two things, everything came
about naturally by itself, as far as Im concerned. I felt I had to respond to a
social need, there was the desire of many people to show solidarity and
support for migrants stranded at the border. I tried to answer chorally,
through unconventional practices, starting from empathy and guided by the
common desire to want to be present for someone else.
138
discrimination by local people (the Ligurians). My mother was one of them,
she suffered then like many others who perhaps today, given their personal
experience, show understanding towards these people who are arriving.
Art needs to embrace people, to get out of the museums, to merge with
reality especially now that we find it hard to imagine that an improvement in
the current state of events is possible. It is like a language, if it speaks from
the heart we understand it and we all speak it, it is not something for a few,
a niche, it is universal.
AC: During our conversation last year, you mentioned that you
started performing as a main medium two years ago. What made you
transition toward this practice? What do you think Live Art adds to
your work around notions of migration, solidarity and change?
LP: irst of all painting has always accompanied me since I can remember
and growing up in certain situations, I experienced it as an authentic and
genuine need. Years ago when I was still working in an office, I took time
out at night and in the weekend to stay awake and paint. Living in such a
difficult context such as the border of Ventimiglia, painting was a release. It
could not however be anything more, it remained a void, an underlying
dissatisfaction that even I personally did not know how to fill. Every day I
witnessed racism in police controls on trains, in my mind I could hear my
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mothers voice when she used to tell me how the Ligurians treated her just
because she was an immigrant from Calabria. I myself, was an economic
migrant commuter to France. The French call us rital, a nickname which
means Italian refugees. But on that train I had the right skin colour, the
right piece of paper in my pocket and I didnt do anything to deserve this
luck. The turning point was when I became aware of the work of
Michelangelo Pistoletto and in particular that of Tania Bruguera. They
opened my eyes. I understood that reality itself is the material to be
moulded and artivism, as understood by Tania Bruguera, was the way
forward.
Whatever we are doing now, we are weaving the future reality. It is from
this point that the awareness has grown that our imagination, our feelings,
and our body, are the most effective and most authentic instruments to
shape and transform reality and our own life into a beautiful piece of work.
Another thing that has marked a step towards Live Art was an episode that
I experienced. One evening I was invited to attend a dinner in the dark
organised by an association of blind people in Sanremo, to raise money but
also to allow people to experience for a short time what it means to not be
able to see. To live that situation has opened up a world for me. I realised
that through the body and having a direct experience of something you do
not know, if only for a brief moment, that experience becomes part of your
emotional baggage. It triggers something empathic that leaves its mark.
From there I thought that I could create and make experiences come to life.
A year later I quit my job to devote myself completely to art and human
rights. I started attending a reception centre for asylum seekers in
Ventimiglia and as a result of the number of shipwrecks in the
Mediterranean, I started to organise public commemoration moments, flash
mobs. They were brief moments in memory of those who hadnt made it
and those who were en route to a better life, at the same time it was a
pretext to bring together migrants with that part of the townspeople who
cared about showing solidarity. We formed a circle on the seafront and a
trumpeter played a version of il Silenzio, a piece that is played in Italy just
before a short period of particular contemplation in silence. After five
minutes of reflection, the moment was over. But what happened at the end
of the action was that the migrants and the citizens started talking and
140
getting acquainted with each other and from this I realised that simply being
there was important, it left a mark.
In June 2015, more than two hundred migrants marched to the border and
occupied the border cliff asking France to let them in. After two days,
volunteers, activists, passers-by showed their solidarity with these people,
bringing them all kinds of necessities from food to tents for sleeping. Some
people even started living together with them. The majority of the migrants,
despite the fatigue, observed fasting during the day as it was the period of
Ramadan and in the evening an imam came from Nice, France to direct the
prayers. It was 20th June 2015, World Refugee Day.
In the same place, a year later, I organised another human chain including
Italian and French activists of Amnesty International and Italian and French
citizens. Unfortunately episodes of violence by the police against migrants
at the border, made it more prudent not to invite them to participate.
141
to transpose onto my body the experience of not being able to move where
I want, which started from a study inspired by the realms of living creatures.
The investigation focuses on the difference between the scientific definition
of vegetable and animal realms. It emerged that the main point that
highlights the difference between these two worlds is the ability of
movement. Right on the border between these two realms, man has been
creating a third new space where its freedom of movement is self-limited.
During the action I stood with my feet planted in the soil, bonded by a rope
to a grate and holding a living snail in my hand. I started taking awareness
of my body, by slowly moving my hands and arms then moving my feet and
legs. I continued to move taking awareness of the space gradually
increasing the rhythm of my movements until I reached the point where the
rope totally unfolded.
There started the fight between my will to move away and the rope forcing
me to stay in a delimited space. I started to run from where the action
began towards the public although the rope kept on tugging me down. I
continued to do this until, exhausted, I set the snail free on the ground as a
symbolic ritual of separation from the animal realm. I remained there,
occupying a limbo space, watching the snail slowly move away while
drawing a trace of its passage.
LP: In fact I do feel quite isolated, maybe because of the fact that I live in a
region that doesnt offer a lot artistically and in a country that still finds it
difficult to take into consideration the work of someone over 35 not
represented by a gallery yet and not really inside the art system. What I
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find of great interest in this moment is to know that I am not alone in doing
what I do, getting to know the work of other artists, expanding my views on
this topic, deepening my research and bringing my exploration to a broader
level. I am starting a collaboration with a group of refugee artists in Paris
with whom I hope to develop a project in Calais this year. I am absolutely
convinced that artists need to know and to connect with each other, to me
its a breath of pure oxygen. I got to know the amazing work of artists I
didnt know to be honest and I would love to have the opportunity to
develop something together.
AC: For you this year has already started as a committed, courageous
one. What are you preparing for the coming months?
LP: There are some things in the pipeline and I would like to carry them out
well.
From 5th to 12th March I have been invited by the Councillor of Culture of
the City of San Biagio to host a retrospective on my works from last year,
which include not only performances but also some paintings. In the space
called U BASTU I will expose my paintings of my Landscapes series on
which for the opening I will let live snails move and live their marks, while
there will be a lecture of some extracts of Francesco Biamontis book
Vento largo.
This writer was born in San Biagio and in that book he tells the story of a
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smuggler who helped some people to reach France by secret mountain
paths of the area where I live.
Then, there are a couple of dreams I have hidden away for some time
One day I hope to have the opportunity to learn from two artists that I
admire in particular, perhaps with a residency or a workshop; William Pope
L. to explore the similarities that bind racism in Europe and in the United
States; and Tania Bruguera for her courage and for what she has meant to
me. Theres still a lot to learn and a lot to do.
144
boundaries of her field of research.
Additional resources
145
Appendix Images Credits:
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